A Woman Under the Influence and 3 Other Great Movies You'll Never Want to See Twice
Turn them on only if you are ready.
The movies in this list, although they are masterpieces of cinema, leave a painful impression after viewing. We do not recommend that you watch them if you are not prepared for strong emotions or if you feel depressed.
1. Oldboy, 2003
Oh Dae-su, a simple Korean man, gets drunk on his way to his three-year-old daughter's birthday party and ends up at the police station. From there he is kidnapped by unknown people and put into a very strange prison.
15 years later he is unexpectedly released. Oh Dae-su wants to find out whose bad joke it was. He is helped by the cook of a Japanese restaurant, Mi-do.
The experience of watching Oldboy cannot be called pleasant, even though it is absolutely impossible to tear yourself away from the screen. All we see is a complete madness, but the detective story captivates from the first seconds.
2. A Woman Under the Influence, 1974
Mabel is a Los Angeles housewife who lives with her husband, Nick, and their three children. Mabel sends the kids to their grandmother's house and hopes to spend the evening alone with her husband.
But he gets stuck at work, and the day ends in disaster. The tension between the couple grows, and Mabel is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The camera inexorably follows the sensitive and emotional woman as she slowly slides into hysteria. Mabel seems to be under a microscope, all her nervous twitches, absurd reactions and reflections are recorded.
3. The Zone of Interest, 2023
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig are raising five children and enjoying a comfortable life in Poland in 1943. The fence of their cozy family nest borders the prison wall.
While the chimneys of the stoves outside the fence continue to smoke, the Höss children play with the prisoners' teeth and Hedwig tries on their clothes.
British director Jonathan Glazer's film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It offers a different perspective on the Holocaust – a detached, unemotional story about the banality of evil. This movie does not show death and other horrors, but it clearly conveys the greed of the average fascist family.
4. Dancer in the Dark, 2000
Selma is an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who has moved to Washington with her son and works in a factory. She suffers from a serious genetic disease that is slowly robbing her of her sight.
To save for her son's operation, she puts away every penny she earns. But one day her savings are stolen and Selma ends up in prison.
This list could include all of Lars von Trier's films. Dancer in the Dark was chosen because of the cinematography with a hand-held camera, which imitates the main character's loss of sight and her unstable condition.