But seven weeks or so after the election, I've continued to sequester what happened in a small isolated area of my brain. And besides, I don't want to give that guy any more words of publicity, even negative publicity, than he's already getting. (Maybe that little eye twitch he's experiencing at this exact moment in time is the realization that some infinitesimal amount of his spotlight is dissipating into thin air.)
Instead, I want to talk about how in 2024, I could not escape the genre movie.
I'm not talking about there being a preponderance of the sorts of genre movies that have been dominating the movie landscape until recently, like the superhero movie. No, I mean that everywhere I looked in 2024, a prestige horror or thriller was looking back at me. So much so, in fact, that after awhile I started to wonder where all the dramas had gone.
I'm not sure this is the time to crunch actual numbers, since that's something I will do plenty of in less than three weeks. However, I do think the sense of this was palpable, such that I asked myself if I needed to skip the next one of these I came across, just so I wouldn't be only ranking high-concept horrors or thrillers at the end of the year.
Just quickly scanning down my list -- which will not be complete for another 18 days -- I find the following titles (listed alphabetically) to conform to this notion in some sense:
AfrAId
Arcadian
Atlas
Blink Twice
Borderlands
Don't Move
Drive-Away Dolls
House of Spoils
It's What's Inside
Late Night With the Devil
Longlegs
Monkey Man
The Platform 2
Strange Darling
The Substance
Trap
The Watchers
Woman of the Hour
Well, my premise for this post was not really borne out by a list of the titles, which actually seems to be more piddly than I thought, especially when taken in comparison with the many other 2024 movies that could not even be squeezed in to fit that premise.
But really, when I'm thinking back on a year and trying to encapsulate it on the cusp of the calendar flipping over, it's more about a feeling I get. And the feeling I got in 2024 was that genre movies with slightly hooky conceits were where studios wanted to spend their money, and there were parts of the year where one seemed to be coming out every week.
The good news was that many of them were very good. I'll focus on one now.
It's probably not worth going into too many details about Strange Darling, JT Mollner's structurally ambitious movie about a serial killer. At least not without a spoiler warning, so here it is: SPOILERS FOR STRANGE DARLING.
The movie is told in six chapters, but the chapters are not shown in order. Because Wikipedia summarizes the plot linearly, I can't tell you what the order was, but I think it was something like 3-1-5-2-4-6. I know 6 was last. In the course of watching this movie, you go from thinking one of the two main characters is the victim of the other character, to realizing that the one you thought was the victim is actually the killer. It's very well done, I didn't get out ahead of what it was doing (though I understand some people did), and I found that the sequence of the chapters was exactly perfect to pull the wool over our eyes for just long enough to blow our minds.
The thing is, I didn't even find Strange Darling particularly unusual in 2024, as it was just one movie doing something really interesting along these lines (though not always as successfully). Another was It's What's Inside, and I'll spare you any spoilers for that one if you haven't seen it yet.
Will this be a defining way we look back on 2024?
Probably not, but hey, it's better than spending this post talking about Donald Trump.
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