Institutions Fail And Individuals Shine At AFI’s 2024 European Union Showcase

If there’s a united theme to be found in AFI’s 2024 European Union Film Showcase, it’s one of institutional failure. In film after film, systems fail the individual, whether it’s a story of serial killers or rambunctious young musicians. The characters showcased in this year’s film festival regard a cruel or indifferent system, then have no choice but to assert their individuality, in ways that are deeply personal and at times transcendent. Perhaps this reflects a continent where the grip of the far right continues to grow tighter, and the order holding it together, whether it’s the EU itself or the broader social contract, is flimsier than ever.

This sounds dire, but many of the filmmakers see these conditions—an orphanage run by a tyrant, a society that sees women as vessels, a society that denies dignity in death—as opportunities to celebrate the individual. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, one of the year’s greatest films, is a perfect example, as is the frothy, delightful Italian musical Gloria! from first-timer Margherita Vicario. Throughout the festival, you’ll watch characters who must confront something bigger than themselves with courage, and while their success or failure depends on the sensibility of the film’s director, taken as a whole, the showcase argues that resisting complacency makes all the difference. With 54 films scheduled to screen throughout the showcase spanning Dec. 4 through 22, we can’t review every film on AFI’s program, but you won’t want to miss the highlights below.

The Girl with the Needle

From the film The Girl with the Needle; courtesy of AFI

Directed with grim clarity by Magnus von Horn, The Girl with the Needle dramatizes the true story of a Danish serial killer who claimed she was performing a public service by murdering unwanted children. Like 2022’s Persian-language crime thriller Holy Spider and Germany’s 2019 horror drama The Golden Gloves, von Horn follows his subject stubbornly, no matter how dark the material gets.

The setting, Denmark in the immediate aftermath of World War I, is a hostile place where women struggle to make ends meet. The film follows Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a seamstress who begins an affair with Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the owner of the factory where she works. He pities her and gets her pregnant in short order. Desperate and lonely, Karoline is about to perform a risky abortion on herself when a stranger, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), offers to help.

Dyrholm has been a mainstay of Danish cinema for decades; here, she is downright chilling as Dagmar. She dupes a powerless Karoline into an impossible situation where she’s forced to serve as Dagmar’s accomplice for future killings. It is a minor miracle that von Horn finds a hopeful note in a film that depicts the grisly murders of children. The inky, cold black-and-white photography might be the only reason this material is tolerable: It abstracts the gory details and innocent victims, which gives the film more room to explore what would compel women to kill.

The Girl with the Needle is not for the squeamish, and the erosion of women’s bodily autonomy in the United States only makes it tougher to sit through, but it’s not quite horror or a crime drama. As the director and co-writer, von Horn eschews both genres to craft a film where the uncompromising vision is its own kind of tonic. It does not shy away from its depiction of evil, and expects that bracing honesty is enough for its audience to undertake the same journey.

The Girl with the Needle screens at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 7, and Sunday, Dec. 8. Tickets here.

The Brutalist

From the film The Brutalist; courtesy of A24

The Brutalist is a towering achievement, a mid-century drama that spans decades and somehow seems to unfold in no time at all. Co-written and directed by Brady Corbet, whose previous film was 2018’s divisive pop star drama Vox Lux, The Brutalist is the sort of film so ambitious and rich that entire books could be written about it. Like the buildings of its hero, Corbet’s film leaves a permanent, striking impression.

Adrien Brody plays László, a brilliant Hungarian Jewish architect, who begins the film by docking at Ellis Island in the late 1940s. Corbet’s camera follows László through the bowels of the ship, and when he reveals the abstracted image of the Statue of Liberty, the music by Daniel Blumberg hits a triumphant bellow. This is not a timid film—it’s an epic that synthesizes various threads to tell a memorable story about an extraordinary man in mid-century America, a period of possibility with darkness and prejudice still lurking in the shadows.

In small towns outside Philadelphia, László toils in obscurity at his cousin’s furniture company until he meets Harrison (Guy Pearce), a vain, wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s benefactor. In the long center section of the film, László realizes his vision: a multipurpose building that is the synthesis of all his ideas and sensibilities. The project makes everyone go a little mad, including László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and changes the course of their lives permanently.

The Brutalist is a long film. It’s just over three and a half hours—not including a built-in intermission—but it’s so propulsive you barely feel the run time. Corbet leaves enough ambiguity to engage your mind and emotions, even if some audiences may find such an approach ambiguous to a fault; no one, however, will be able to deny the performances. Brody has never been better, and Pearce gnashes the scenery in a way that recalls John Huston’s performance in Chinatown. Jones imbues a brittle, fierce quality into Erzsébet—a side she has never shown on screen before.

AFI’s EU Showcase will present a 70mm print of the film, an opportunity to see it as Corbet intended (he shot it in VistaVision, a film format typically found in Golden Age Hollywood classics like North by Northwest and The Searchers). Between the rare print and an ending that’ll make you rethink the film’s meaning, The Brutalist is the cinematic experience at this year’s festival you will not want to miss.

The Brutalist, a coproduction between the U.S., the UK, and Hungary, in 70mm screens at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 14. Tickets here.

Gloria!

From Gloria!, courtesy of AFI

During the time I’ve been covering this festival, most of the films AFI programs tend to be dark, humorless, or both. There is nothing wrong with that, especially since the world is increasingly grim, but watching relentlessly dour cinema can be exhausting. Gloria!, a historical musical set in Italy, is a welcome reprieve from the dark and depressing. It unfolds like a riff on Sister Act, but ends with brilliant young things defying the Pope.

You may recognize the film’s young star, Galatea Bellugi, from last year’s The Taste of Things or 2022’s Amanda—two of the most satisfying European films of the past few years. Here she plays Teresa, a maid at an orphanage near Venice where most of the young women learn music and composition. Although Teresa doesn’t have any formal education, co-writer and director Margherita Vicario suggests she has an innate and creative sense of music, which she dabbles in, while the school’s stern director, Perlina (Paolo Rossi), diminishes her and his pupils at every turn, using the inherent sexism with the Catholic country to his advantage.

Gloria! plays like a battle of wills between Perlina and Teresa. Vicario injects the material with some welcome revisionism, giving the young musicians modern musical sensibilities and some heartwarming “girl power” antics. But a visit from the Poperaises the stakes, culminating in a musical sequence where Teresa triumphs over Perlina and the patriarchy. Put another way, the vibes in this film are a welcome reprieve.

The only trouble with this material is that, for a supposed musical prodigy, the music in Gloria! is frequently unremarkable. Sometimes Vicario adds modern flourishes, like in a scene where Teresa seemingly imagines synthesizers, and yet the climax involves a composition that never reaches the level of transcendence promised. There’s no reason it couldn’t have ended with even more anachronism, since the fate of the characters are already unrealistic. Still, it’s hard to fault Vicario and her eager cast because they deserve their moment of triumph after so much indignity.

Gloria screens at 2:45 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 15, and 7 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 16. Tickets here.

Alpha

From Alpha, courtesy of AFI

Have you noticed that the Alps constantly serve as a metaphor for masculinity? In 2014’s Force Majeure, a father must confront his own inadequacies after he fails to protect his family from an avalanche. The Eight Mountains (2022) goes in a different direction, with one man who sees the mountains as an escape. Now we have Alpha, a father and son adventure in the Alps that mixes bonding with survival. It may be another “masculinity is a prison” movie, although it’s handsome and well-acted enough so that we may still pity men who break through their conditioning only after the mountain makes a mockery of them.

We meet Rein (Reinout Scholten van Aschat), a 30-ish Dutch snowboard instructor who left his flat homeland for the imposing mountain scenery. He lives quietly, comfortable with the simplicity and ease of his life, until his father, Gijs (Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Reinout’s real-life father), pays a visit. Both men bring baggage to their relationship: Gijs, anxious to prove he’s not that old, needles his son as the two continue to grieve the loss of Rein’s mother. All their resentments calcify on the mountain where an accident causes both of them to fight for their lives.

That the actors playing Gijs and Rein are related adds to the dynamic between their characters. Director and writer Jan-Willem van Ewijk expertly depicts little comments and asides that anyone with an overbearing relative will relate to. The beauty of the mountain scenery adds a contrast between the family drama and setting, which captures the childishness of the father and son, at least until they’re forced to put aside their differences.

Alpha is two movies in one—because the survival thriller section is shot perfunctorily with a foregone conclusion, the series of calamities that define the second half lack the energy and intensity from its first. The opening half, however, is a sharp character study about two flawed men who bring out the worst in each other. Of course, the mountain brings out their best. Unfortunately, from previous films set in the Alps, we know that’s not always enough.

Alpha screens at 4:50 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 20, and 9:10 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 21. Tickets here.

The Room Next Door

The Room Next Door, the English-language film debut from Pedro Almodóvar; courtesy of AFI

The master of Spanish filmmaking Pedro Almodóvar is now 75, and like many of his contemporaries, a preoccupation with death and aging is a major theme of his later work. You can see it in Pain and Glory (2019), his semiautobiographical masterpiece starring Antonio Banderas. In his English-language feature debut The Room Next Door, he returns to the theme of aging with the sensitivity and psychological depth that has defined his finest films.

Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a successful author who learns her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) has been diagnosed with a rare cancer. Close once as young writers, the pair fell out of touch as they got older, but Martha’s illness gives Ingrid a good excuse to reconnect. As they become nearly inseparable, Martha drops a bombshell: She plans to die by suicide, but needs Ingrid to help her. The film gets its title from their living arrangement—a way for Martha to end her life without being utterly alone.

Although there are some flashbacks, Moore and Swinton share the screen for most of the film, speaking with hushed tones that barely conceal their depth of feeling. At times, the plot can be melodramatic, yet Almodóvar shoots this unusual situation—one that deserves more dignity than the American justice system is willing to provide—by treating his characters as adults who use sophistication as an emotional guardrail. There are other hallmarks of the filmmaker’s work, such as lush primary colors and an obsession with immaculate-looking kitchens (arguably no filmmaker has taken such care into a film’s interior design). Sometimes the dialogue sounds forced, even clunky, but, as a non-Spanish speaker, it’s unclear whether that’s intentional: maybe his scripts have been that way all along?

If The Room Next Door ends up being Almodóvar’s only English-language feature, it will be a fitting final personal and political statement. Swinton and Moore are worthy avatars of the director’s preoccupations. There’s a sadness in the ways Martha and her friend consider her final days, but the film successfully offers a mix of perseverance and hope that leads you to believe that death is not necessarily synonymous with the end.