The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Surrealism began as an artistic movement in the 1920s. Here painters like Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte and not long after writers and filmmakers sought to challenge traditional naturalism by the use of a series of non-sequitur juxtapositions.
The idea was initially to allow the subconscious free reign and break away from realism. Surrealism specialises in non-logical connections, juxtaposition of objects and images that do not match, where symbolism is often made literal, or the absurd and nonsensical are allowed free reign. On film, surrealism will often break with traditional narrative or treat the ridiculous with deadpan seriousness.
Surrealism began on film with early works during the 1920s from Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel. There has been no real movement for surrealist cinema as such, more a case of individual works and directors who specialise in it. Noted surrealist directors include Robert Altman, Quentin Dupieux, Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Gondry, Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Charles Kaufman, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Takashi Miike, Bill Plympton, The Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmajer.
Classic film that was groundbreaking for its designs – all distorted and angular sets, exaggerated shadows – that became defined as German Expressionism and its tale of a sinister hypnotist
One of the lesser films made by the director of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Robert Wiene. Wiene employs the same stark angular sets and exaggerated shadows in the tale of a predatory femme fatale
Forgotten silent Japanese avant garde classic set in a mental asylum. This has many similarities to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in its shifting perspectives that delve into the subjective mental space of the inmates
Famous surrealist short film made as a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, full of the shock juxtapositions and symbolism you associate with either
This collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali is not much more than a plotless series of surrealistic images, which are frequently calculated to outrage
Early film from Jean Cocteau that consists of a progression of surreal situations. Dreamy and occasionally interesting
Disney’s animated adaptation is usually hated by Lewis Carroll purists for its free and easy treatment of the story but for everyone else comes with a splendidly demented visual absurdism
Jean Cocteau’s follow-up to his earlier Orpheus becomes an opportunity where Cocteau makes an autobiographical films, revisiting his own life and works
An extraordinary work from the French New Wave filled with incredible visuals as lovers drift through an ornate hotel where memory and time itself seems to shift
Orson Welles’s adaptation of the Frank Kafka novel about a man caught in a nightmare bureaucracy is one of the most visually stunning black-and-white films ever shot
An acclaimed surrealistic film from Luis Buñuel in which a group of people attend an upper-class dinner party but then find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the room
A Federico Fellini film in which Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays a housewife whose grasp starts to slip over until it is taken over by hallucination and fantasy
Surrealistic cinematic joke from French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard that mashes up film noir and SF where hard-boiled detective travels to another planet represented by contemporary Paris
A World War II comedy from Richard Lester that heads into a wild absurdism, a film that is both brilliant and numbingly noisy. Most did not get the surreal blacker-than-black tone and the film was not a success
LSD film from Roger Corman featuring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper and full of hilariously surreal and trippily psychedelic moments
Jean-Luc Godard’s classic of the French New Wave where a couple’s journey into the countryside for the weekend becomes increasingly more surreal and anarchic
The third of The Beatles films, in this case an animated work that features likenesses of The Fab Four as they trip through some amazing nonsensical psychedelic visuals
The first film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, more like a student film that seems a rehearsal for the surrealistic and outrageous imagery of El Topo, although no less uniquely Jodorowsky-esque for all that
One of the works of the celebrated Ingmar Bergman with Max Von Sydow as an artist tormented by insomnia who starts to slip into disturbing hallucinations where he (and we) can not be certain what is being seen is real
Eccentric French fairytale filled with appealingly absurdist and surreal touches and with visuals that remind of the extravagance of a Barbarella. Charming and visually engaging
Chuck Jones, the director of numerous Warner Brothers cartoons, adapts a popular children’s book that comes with a dizzying array of surreal visuals and puns
Cult film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surrealistic Western that comes with an incoherent mishmash of symbolism, Zen mysticism and 1960s raised consciousness
Little-seen Czech film that sits on the blurred edge of a dream in its hazily surreal view of the world through the eyes of a young girl where the figures around her seem to become vampires that constantly loom with darkly allegorical sexual threat
Classic anti-war film with Timothy Bottoms as a limbless, sightless soldier in a hospital bed as his mind wanders between hallucinations, visions of the afterlife and attempts to communicate with the medical staff
Obscure film in which director Fernando Arrabal depicts a series of vignettes from his childhood depicting the sadism and cruelty of the Spanish Fascists
A fascinatingly enigmatic work from Robert Altman, an artily experimental film in which the identities of five people together at a countryside cottage begin to shift and blur
An Academy Award winning film from the great iconoclast Luis Buñuel, a series of surreal vignettes as a group of friends set out to dinner but always end up being prevented in strange ways
An Acid Western was a Western made with a psychedelic trippiness. Directed by Robert Downey Jr’s father, this is a surreal work about a Christ-like visitor in a zoot suit who turns up in a Western town
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant are usually known for their arthouse works. This is their strangest film where a group of savages discover a mansion and adopt civilised ways
A live-action film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that conducts a passable run through of Lewis Carroll with the supporting characters populated by an all-star British cast
One of the other films from Jim Sharman, director of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a gonzo comedy where alien visitors bring a statue of the Duke of Edinburgh to life
A film about strange happenings at a mission where all the characters may be reincarnations. A film of the hippie era that gets lost in mysticism and trippiness
A key work in the cult of Alejandro Jodorowsky in which he plays a character called The Alchemist who guides a group on a mystical awakening. Surreal, challenging and mind-expanding
Anarchic French film entirely without dialogue as a group of people in an apartment begin to revert to pre-civilised behaviour
The first film from Peter Weir, a deadpan black comedy in which a man comes around from a car crash to find himself in a small town that subsists by creating car crashes
Vastly over-praised French New Wave film that is a ghost story of sorts. Three hours plus of tediously protracted happenings that don’t seem to be about anything at all
A recently rediscovered work that was sold as a lost George Romero film. Romero was hired to make a film about the plight of the elderly and creates a surreal allegorical work set around an amusement park
Louis Malle’s one and only venture into the French New Wave – a baffling work set around social collapse as a young girl wanders a farmhouse encountering unicorns, talking animals and various surreal happenings
The first film from the great Alan Parker, a 1920s gangster film but where the entire show is played out with kids, which include a young Jodie Foster. Regarded as a classic by many, this is a one-gimmick film dependent on kids (not) being able to play a complex range of adult emotions
One of Roman Polanski’s least recognised films in which he both directs and plays the lead as a mousy man driven to a state of paranoia and the point he loses his identity by the neighbours in a Parisian apartment building
The great Robert Altman was one of the most individualistic and downright eccentric American directors. His most head-scratching efforts were when he experimented in genre cinema like this cryptic and baffling work in which three (mainly two) women appear to exchange identities
The first film from David Lynch, a surrealist work that is one the cult films of all-time. A masterpiece of mood that swims in an atmosphere of dream and Freudian symbolism of cryptically inscrutable meaning
Dennis Potter was the greatest writer to ever work in televisio. This mini-series is one of his most celebrated works, featuring characters bursting out into lip-synched Golden Oldie songs, making biting contrast to their downbeaten lives
From Eric Rohmer, a director of the French New Wave, an adaptation of stories from the Arthurian legends, made in a decidedly eccentric style
The penultimate screen role of Peter Sellers, a sublimely deadpan satire in which he plays a gardener with the blank innocence of a child whose simple-minded utterances are taken as words of great profundity
Surreal and plotless British film based on a radio show about the happenings around a country mansion
Early Peter Greenaway film where in typically eccentric fashion he tells a series of absurd stories about survivors of a mysterious event who names all begin with Fall who have begun to mutate and develop an obsession with birds
Bafflingly surreal film from Andrzej Zulawski in which Isabelle Adjani gives birth to a tentacled monster in a subway. Nobody has any idea what the film is about but it has become a cult work since
Adaptation of a Doris Lessing novel set in a collapsing future England. Nicely portrayed but crytpically surreal touches end up baffling
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
More of an abstract art short than a film. Dialogueless, almost plotless, this concerns the lone human in a city inhabited by inscrutable beings that amuse themselves by rearranging matter
Surrealist film from Raul Ruiz that proves a tedious, drawn-out ramble through disconnected images and non-sequiturs
Long and baffling German surrealist film that makes much reference to German silent cinema. Lots of avant garde set ups without any real point
One of the earliest works of anime director Mamoru Oshii, later famous for Ghost in the Shell. This is a plotless, almost dialogueless work about a young girl journeying across a strange planet that is more surrealism than SF
Obscure animated children’s movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that commits the sin of modernising and Americanizing Alice
A work of bizarre genius from stop-motion animator Jan Svankmajer. A surrealist take on Alice in Wonderland that is more Eraserhead than Lewis Carroll, filled with Svankmajer’s bizarre Claymation creatures
This collaboration between Nicolas Roeg and Dennis Potter results in a mind-boggling blurring of dream, reality, symbolism and sexual obsession. A name cast are allowed their heads and go wild
Extraordinary directorial debut from Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto, a frenetic, fetishistic and surreally deranged vision of man-machine fusion that feels like David Lynch having gone away and done a crash reading course of William Gibson
Near indescribable mix of horror, hallucination, surrealism and tormented sexuality – quite possibly cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky at his best
The original The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a classic of silent German Expressionist cinema; this loose remake feels like Eraserhead reconceived with absurd Day-Glo disco decor
Peer Greeaway’s finest film, an elegant, surrealistic satire on fine dining with Michael Gambon as the mob boss owner of a restaurant with Helen Mirren as his unfaithful wife
A dark Coming of Age story set in a surreal depiction of the midwest populated by what might be vampires and angels
David Lynch’s dive into the dark underbelly of smalltown weirdness became the cult tv series of the 1990s. This is the slightly re-edited pilot issued for theatrical release internationally, which offers an ungainly wrap-up to the proceedings
The first film from E. Elias Merhige, subsequent director of Shadow of the Vampire. An unfathomably strange film in the Eraserhead vein about gods disemboweling themselves, rebirthing and being beset upon by nomads.
The second film from Guy Maddin, which comes with all of his familiar homages to German Expressionism and silent cinema, wrapped up in a surrealist plot of hilarious melodrama and side-splittingly deadpan dialogue
Completely demented Greek film about a mother and daughter imprisoning and torturing people in a big old house
One of David Lynch’s finest films, with lovers Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern on the run in a road movie that travels through deranged places of the mind and explodes with crazy energy
Incomprehensible surrealism from director Raul Ruiz about a doctor sent to investigate a village where miracles occur with commonplace regularity
The first film from the inimitable Bill Plympton, a work of bizarre surrealist animation and strange satiric transformations as a man sets out on a journey to find the final line for a tune
David Lynch’s cinematic prequel to his cult tv series critically divides people. Charting the last days of the doomed prom queen Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee gives a tour-de-force performance
The third film from Guy Maddin film. This feels like a parody/homage to German Expressionism all filmed on deliberately unreal sets and purple dialogue played with an hilarious deadpan
Shinya Tsukamoto makes a better budgeted sequel to his breakthrough hit. The first film was a masterpiece of guerilla filmmaking but the same frenzied fetishism is missing here
All-star adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel that gets a far better sense of the book’s black ironies than the previous Orson Welles version
Bizarre stop-motion animated version of the farytale that resembles Gumby that takes place in a surreal Eraserhed-like world
This English-language debut from Emir Kusturica should have been a hit going by its cast that includes a young Johnny Depp romancing a 50+ Faye Dunaway, but is a plotless piece of improv of occasional surreal interludes
Peter Greenaway film about a woman claiming her baby is divinely conceived. As fascinating for Greenaway’s constant visual games as for the film’s brutal taboo-defying impact
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer offers up his wonderfully bizarre part-live-action, part-Claymation interpretation of the classic story of Faust and his pact with The Devil
Extraordinary Belgian fabulist film, part-animated, part live-action, that takes place in a surreal alternate world
A cryptic surrealist full-length film from The Brothers Quay set at an enigmatic butler training school. Beautifully designed and photographed.
Woody Allen makes a musical. It is Allen in a much lighter mood than he was in the early 1990s and the film comes with some appealingly eccentric and often downright surreal touches
Baffling and pretentious Canadian-made surrealist film with Scheherazade (from Arabian Nights) in a psychiatric asylum making up stories all derived from tabloid headlines
One of the most obscure films in the oeuvre of Steven Soderbergh, a strange and head-scratchingly surreal satire of workplace and domestic life
Cult Czech stop-motion animator, Jan Svankmajer makes an eccentrically surreal live-action film that focuses on a variety of different people who have strange fetishes
A bafflingly surreal yet compulsive David Lynch film in which Bill Pullman and wife receives mysterious threatening videotapes and Bill then inexplicably turns into Balthazar Getty
Another of Guy Maddin’s surreal kitsch films all delivered in deadpan prose, this boasts more of a name cast than usual for Maddin
A quite indescribable animated film from the great Bill Pympton, this largely consists of a series of bizarre and surreal, often outrageous, transformations and juxtapositions
In attempting to capture the surreal, paranoiac drug haze of Hunter S. Thompson’s counter-culture classic, Terry Gilliam’s adaptation becomes a rambling, self-indulgent mess of tripped-out visions that go on and on
An obscure joke from Alex Cox that has he and Miguel Sandoval as two businessman who go to dinner but keep passing through different cities
Adaptation of the classic J.G. Ballard novel that deals with the surreal blurring and breakdown between media, architecture, celebrity and the protagonist’s disturbed state of mind
Hilariously eccentric Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman collaboration in which John Cusack finds an office building that has a portal that takes someone through into actor John Malkovich’s head. The wacky spins that the script places on the idea are ingenious
From Paul Thomas Anderson, a series of interlinking stories and character sketches, featuring some great performances. Underlining everything is a fascination with the inexplicable and the works of Charles Fort
A fairly reasonable tv mini-series adaptation of Lewis Carroll – a version that excels in terms of design and in using The Jim Henson Workshop to bring the Wonderland creatures to life
An autobiographical film from music video and film director Phil Joanou, this comes with a number of surreal fantastical touches
Unrelated to Robert Louis Stevenson, this is a bafflingly surrealist parody of a 1940s thriller
Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive was a Yakuza film with a gonzo ending. In this sequel, Miike brings back the same two actors and makes it ALL gonzo
Hilarious Jan Svankmajer film about a mother who decides to treat a log as a child. Full of blackly funny humour before transforming into a macabre monster movie
The dreamscape film was given extraordinary life by Tarsem Singh in his directorial debut who transforms a fairly ordinary script with visuals and costuming that is out of this world
From Swedish director Roy Andersson, a series of plotless, surreal vignettes pitched with black humour
An anime from Satoshi Kon that tells the story of an actress and become a surreal journey through Japanese cinematic history
David Lynch work of Hollywood noir in which novice actress Naomi Watts (in the role that made her name) is drawn into a surreal idenity blurring mystery. As always with Lynch, this baffling, weird and mesmerising