Gretchen's Top 10 Films of 2022

10. The Northman, Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers’ third film is undoubtedly his shakiest, losing some of its momentum and aesthetic flare as it enters its third act, but its unforgettable early action sequences and the window it provides into Norse culture as a context both alien and oddly familiar cement it as one of the most engrossing medieval epics of its time.

9. Good Madam, Mlungu Wam

While technically a 2021 release, Mlungu Wam’s Good Madam only reached American screens this year, and its chilling depiction of South African domestic labor performed by indigenous Black workers for their white overlords is truly skin-crawling. From its singularly frightening incantation to its fraught mother-daughter dynamics, Wam’s movie is endlessly rich and rewatchable.

8. Nope, Jordan Peele

A studiously clean and simple monster movie, Peele’s latest makes its complex central metaphor about Blackness, Hollywood, and the double-edged sword of onscreen performance seem weightless with its speed and precision. Its creature design is unforgettable, its opening a blood-spattered nightmare draped in the skin of that hoary old creature, the American sitcom.

7. Prey, Dan Trachtenberg

“You’re ready to hunt something that’s hunting you?” Two warriors face off as colonialist violence begins to break over the American Midwest, their dueling rights of passage forcing them into a brutal contest of survival. Trachtenberg’s action thriller is a delightful throwback to the big, muscular movies and earnest humor of the 1980s and 90s, and star Amber Midthunder is more than game to carry it.

6. Resurrection, Andrew Semans

There is an almost fairytale brutality to Andrew Semans’ Resurrection, the story of a troubled woman thrust suddenly back into contact with her abusive ex-husband. In her struggle to recapitulate the foundational trauma of her younger self, she rends her own life open and exposes its fault lines to a world that doesn’t know what to do with her. One of the greatest recent monologues, and a long-deserved showcase for Rebecca Hall.

5. Incantation, Kevin Ko

A genuinely bone-chilling found footage nightmare of arbitrary supernatural cruelty, Incantation peels back the skin of religion to show its malignant nature, a sort of living, breathing curse spread from mouth to mouth and mind to mind, demanding the subjugation of millions just so that the individuals supporting it can survive its crushing weight.

4. Lost Illusions, Xavier Giannoli

My friend Sara called this “Goodfellas for Parisian tabloids” and she was completely right. It’s a shameless, ruthless movie about the birth of the tabloid presses, the heartlessness of high society, the stupidity of the young and rich, and the ephemeral nature of truth. Gloriously decadent, but paced like a trailer for a heist movie.

3. Crimes of the future, David Cronenberg

The subtext of all previous Cronenberg body horror joints wriggles free to become the text itself in this tale of spontaneous organ growth, garbage-eating, surgery as sex, and performance art. Humanity is changing faster than it can understand its own changes, and Saul Tenser, whose body’s rampant production of these new tumor-like organs has given him a life as an artist, is at the very center of it. Breathtakingly sensual and deeply affecting.

2. Skinamarink, Kyle Edward Ball

Two young children wake in the night to find their father gone and the doors and windows vanished from inside their house. The primal horror and helplessness of Ball’s feature-length debut feels almost Biblical, and his elliptical shooting style — we catch perhaps two or three glimpses of human faces in the entire course of the film — and extreme restraint let the imagination run wild in the film’s stillnesses and shadows. The film grain makes each patch of darkness seethe as though infested with flies.

1. Blonde, Andrew Dominik

Ferociously divisive even before its release, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of the already controversial Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name is a searing plunge into the molten psychological distress of Norma Jean Baker, better-known by her stage name Marilyn Monroe. If it exploits, it’s because her life was one long grueling gauntlet of exploitation. If it degrades her memory, it’s because she was degraded every day of her life. Astonishing black and white photography and some indelible images of crisis.