You had to be a fan of horror films in 2024, otherwise you risk missing out on some of the most striking, terrifying and (very rarely) moving feature films of this cinematic year. Of The Substance has Longlegspassing through Immaculatehorror cinema has been omnipresent in recent months, in cinemas as well as in the biggest film institutions in the world (starting with the Cannes Film Festival). Offering viewers experiences that are sometimes terrifying and sometimes unforgettable, the best horror films of 2024 have left their mark by diving headlong into the darkest and cruelest territories of humanity. So let's look back at the feature films that excited us the most this year, for better and for worse.
Speak No Evil
Here is an authentic horror film to open this top horror films of 2024, that is to say a film of unpleasantness and discomfort, when social unease metamorphoses into a monstrous creature which grows with each bad decision. Remake of a Danish film, Speak No Evil plays on the jitters of the invitation: an American family in decline, stranded in Europe for professional reasons, meets in Italy a couple of boastful and good-natured English people, parents of a mute child. The little WASP family and its fear of disturbing find itself quickly encompassed by the unabashed fervor of the English family. The invitation to spend a weekend on the family farm will close like a wolf trap on the ankle of unsaid things, of politeness seen as weaknesses, of friendly conventions which loosen the relationship with reality more than anything else. and normal.
Speak No Evil is brilliant in its realism: the panicked fear of disturbing which becomes submission, the underlying toxicity behind the pleasant masks, the gifts which become burdens. Without ever deviating from genre conventions (the last part becoming a home invasion in the tradition of Straw dogs the Sam Peckinpah), Speak No Evil Yet dust off the family tree. Of course, the film is also a showcase for two exceptional actors, whose oblique acting relationship is fascinating: on the one hand, the feline and trapezoidal James McAvoy, on the other, Mackenzie Davis, unfortunately under-exploited actress usually, who shines here in a slow-burn courageous mother role.
On DVD and Blu-ray from January 29, 2025.
Smile 2
Smile first of the name was a small masterpiece of horrific engineering, which started from a disheveled postulate (characters haunted by visions of horror were driven to suicide, not without first infecting a witness with a devilish smile) to affirm at the end of the race like an intimate roller coaster – what if the curse was only a shock, only a traumatic hypothesis, and if the horror was oneself? With Smile 2Parker Finn has the intelligence to take a thematic side step, a way on the one hand to assume the change in status of a license passing from the commonplace to the top of the basket, on the other hand to trade in the smile sad from the first for a smirk and offensive smile, turned towards the crusher: the star system. Skye Riley, popstar, a sort of Frankenstein's monster of the neurotic nightmares of the star system (there a lot of Britney, there a little Whitney Houston…), returns with a new hit after a long time of wandering. But the clever smile (referred to as a brilliant idea by his dealer) will reshuffle the cards for his return…
Smile 2 has the complex beauty of kamikaze films to the point of abstraction: the bodies decompose, become disfigured and the signature smile is nothing more than a pedestal to reach the great horrific statue: a dilapidated wrinkle, which seems to be able to do anything create when a sacrificial body offers itself as pasture to a scopic gaze. Even if the film is too long and ends in a way of the cross for the viewer, Smile 2 reactivates a primitiveness of the gaze, as if this headless story only held on to its shocking images (in literature we speak of hypotyposis), only to impress a gaze that has become captive. As with the lives of stars, when the legend is better than reality, we print the legend.
On DVD and Blu-ray from February 19, 2025.
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