We’re getting close! I think I might do this! Here we go with the next 10 films of the challenge. If you want to see the complete list, it’s here.
I am really enjoying most of my picks, and this time I’ve seen a lot of good ones, but I don’t think I’ve found a new comfort film yet (that’s ok, maybe I won’t this time!). I haven’t got many I would rewatch, either, even if I thought they were excellent – the really good ones I found very emotionally heavy, so I wouldn’t choose to revisit them often, unless I was in the right frame of mind.
Here we go with the next 10:
51) 富江 / Tomie (1998) dir. Ataru Oikawa. This is a fun weird 90s film, and I really like Junji Ito’s work. I enjoyed this adaptation. I haven’t read the manga, and I feel like if I did, I wouldn’t have liked the adaptation so much. I always try to watch the films first before I read the original stories, because then I appreciate the films as films and can enjoy both versions on their own merits. This definitely made me want to read more Ito in general, honestly.
52) 切小金家的旅館 / Secrets in the Hot Spring (2018) dir. Kuan-Hui Lin. A really daft horror-comedy – manages to queerbait so hard it became genderqueer and give GNC teens some softboi/butch rep, congrats..? I don’t know. I have been super stressed with work and this was so daft, and I just needed a laugh, and the trailer bit I saw made me laugh out loud for some reason, so I watched the whole thing. And I’m not sorry.
53) Isolated (2025) dir. Benedict Mique. I really liked this as a chill background horror-thriller I stuck on one lunchtime. It is very predictable in the sense that once a character is introduced as ex-US navy, you know he’ll be a wrong ‘un. It was a fun journey, though.
54) 여곡성 / The Wrath (2018) dir. Yoo Young-seon. Set in 14thC Korea, so I really liked the feudal society depiction, the family politics, and the supernatural threat. I really liked the way it played out. The exorcist was cool. Apparently the FMC is a K-pop star? I didn’t know any K-pop stars except Taemin, but now I know this one, I guess! She was great.
55) Ilargi guztiak / All the Moons (2020) dir. Igor Legarreta. Basque vampire film, slow, Gothic, and beautifully shot. This would be a great double-bill with You Won’t Be Alone, as there are very similar themes of immortality, pseudo-mother-daughter relationships and how they go wrong, and forging a path through life on your own terms, when it wasn’t the life you were meant to be living.
56) Breeder (2020) dir. Jens Dahl. Danish medical/forced pregnancy horror/thriller. Pretty cathartic by the end. They don’t do anything especially different with the whole premise of women being locked up and experimented on, but it kept me interested and I liked the messiness of the main characters.
57) 미드나이트 / Midnight (2021) dir. Kwon Oh-seung. This was a good horror-thriller with some great moments of tension and I really liked the main characters. Bad choices were made throughout and I respect that. I also loved the way she drove with the killer in the backseat (always wear your seatbelts, folks). And I really liked how it ended.
58) Através da Sombra / Through the Shadow (2015) dir. Walter Lima Jr.. This is genuinely one of the best adaptations of Turn of the Screw I’ve seen, as this one gave Laura more of a personality and made something of her sexual repression in ways I appreciated, while also making the kids interesting characters in their own right as well. There was a lot you had to fill in for yourself by knowing the original story, and the end fell a bit flat for me, but I can’t talk, I write abrupt endings myself sometimes… and also it was a complete ending, and extremely uncomfortable. Also, I loved the background of a dying coffee plantation with burning coffee, and the way the evil ghost was on the roof in a cape. Amazing.
59) Vampyros Lesbos (1971) dir. Jesús Franco. Erotic/soft porn German sapphic horror from the 1970s, in which Dracula’s lesbian man-hating Hungarian bride inherits all his stuff and buggers off to a Turkish island to seduce women and drive them insane, but falls for a plucky, sexually repressed lawyer lady who becomes her undoing. Also, she does arty strip-teases by night at a nightclub. It’s a German film by a Spanish director, set in Türkiye. There’s not much more I can say about that, really, except that I don’t think we needed any more Dracula-inspired films after this one. We already peaked.
60) Nattevagten / Nightwatch (1994) dir. Ole Bornedal. I watched the sequel to this not knowing it was the sequel, and it really stuck in my mind. It worked well as its own film, so I honestly had no idea it was the second one, but I loved that they got Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to reprise his original role and kept the same director. Now I’ve finally watched the first one! I fully hated both male leads (congrats, lads, great work) and had to fast forward a bit in the middle (the dinner scene, absolutely not). I really enjoyed how much it was about the messy, awful characters and their dynamics, and not just a cat-and-mouse flick.
Countries A-Z Films 51-60
Brazil
Denmark
Germany
Japan
Philippines
South Korea
Spain
Taiwan
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