Ten more: “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”, “Earth Mama”, “Fallen Leaves”, “Ferrari”, “John Wick: Chapter 4”, “Past Lives”, “RMN”, “Scarlet”, “Will-O’- the -Wisp,” “Youth (Spring).”
Alissa Wilkinson
Where evil lies
This was the year of evil in cinema: heartbreaking, chilling, ordinary evil. It didn’t wear villainous capes, nor did it often arrive in the expected horror movie packaging. That’s why it was so frightening.
This year’s films posited that the opposite of evil is not good; it is reality. Evil was something that scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer struggled with, recognizing that when the physical universe intersects with human ethics, no decision can be truly neutral. Evil was discussed in Cannes at the press conference following “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a film about how barbaric civilization can be. In “The Zone of Interest,” unspeakable evil is voluntarily obscured by people simply going about their everyday business. Bureaucratic language and euphemism prevent them from acknowledging the horrors they perpetuate.
In fact, the way language can mask and produce evil—particularly the banal that comes from self-deception—was seen everywhere in the movies this year. Todd Haynes’ juicy “May December” is full of willful blindness on the part of characters who can’t even find the words to tell the truth about their lives. Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” takes a marriage built on linguistic compromise – the partners communicate in English, a second language for both – as the starting point for a story about the everyday violence that careless words trigger, whether in the courtroom or the living room. And perhaps the strongest and boldest of these was “Reality,” which uses a real interrogation transcript to show the flexibility of words and the way power and justice can be distorted to, well, manipulate reality.
When the great novelist Cormac McCarthy, himself no stranger to cinema, died this year, I thought of him because his vision of evil was far more in line with these depictions than the cartoon villains that Hollywood usually presents. For McCarthy, evil was a force or entity that afflicted humanity, the basic fact of human existence that was difficult to resist and that was somehow embedded in language. In his 1994 novel “The Crossing,” a character says, “The evil ones know that if the evildoers are actually of sufficient cruelty, people will say nothing.” In fact, “men have just enough courage for small evils and only They will fight these.”