Annual pop culture juggernaut SXSW kicks off this Friday, running from March 8 through 16 in Austin, Texas. Daily Grindhouse will be running reviews and interviews out of the Film & TV Festival, bringing you coverage of highly anticipated genre releases. SXSW offers high-profile headliners alongside smaller films waiting to discover an audience, and I’ve compiled a list of 10 movies to watch for as they (hopefully) hit theaters and streaming services soon.
ODDITY
Writer-director Damian Mc Carthy follows up his stellar feature debut CAVEAT with a film that looks just as eerie and unsettling. Starring Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, and CAVEAT’s Jonathan French, ODDITY tells the story of “a blind medium [who] uncovers the truth behind her sister’s death with the help of a frightening wooden mannequin.” Mc Carthy’s first feature demonstrated an impressive knack for exploring the uncanny in ostensibly inanimate objects, and ODDITY looks like it will build on that promise with even more disturbing scares.
IMMACULATE
Sydney Sweeney reunites with Michael Mohan, writer-director of 2021’s erotic thriller THE VOYEURS, for a slice of religious horror in IMMACULATE. Directed by Mohan and written by Andrew Lobel, the film follows Cecilia (Sweeney) as she enters an idyllic Italian convent and discovers sinister secrets at the heart of her new home. In an interview on The Tonight Show, Sweeney said she auditioned for an earlier, unproduced version of the film a decade ago. She couldn’t get the script out of her head, so she contacted Lobel to rework the story and produced the film herself. It’s clearly a passion project for Sweeney, which makes this creepy convent story even more exciting.
MONKEY MAN
Speaking of passion projects… Dev Patel makes his directorial debut with MONKEY MAN; he also stars, produces, and shares a screenwriting credit with Paul Angunawela and John Collee. Patel plays Kid, a masked combatant in an underground fight club whose “mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.” Inspired by the Hindu deity Lord Hanuman, the action thriller promises an electrifying tale of revenge from a star with exhilarating versatility and range.
I SAW THE TV GLOW
Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR is one of the most anticipated queer films in recent memory. Starring Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine as teenagers who bond over “a mysterious late-night TV show,” the film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to glowing (pardon the pun) reviews, particularly from trans critics. Schoenbrun’s approach to coming-of-age horror is singular and vital, and I SAW THE TV GLOW seems poised to raise the bar even higher for their work.
ARCADIAN
A new Nicolas Cage movie is always a welcome sight. Though he’s frequently meme-ified online due to his bold and expressive acting choices, his thoughtful approach to his craft and total commitment to every single role make him a mesmerizing performer. His newest film is the post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller ARCADIAN, which sees Cage fighting for his life alongside his sons, played by Maxwell Jenkins and Jaeden Martell. Written by Mike Nilon and directed by Ben Brewer, this thriller sounds like a nail-biting survival story.
CUCKOO
Writer-director Tilman Singer’s 2018 debut LUZ was inventive and resourceful, turning a small budget and limited space into a uniquely compelling possession story. His follow-up CUCKOO, which premiered at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, stars Hunter Schafer as Gretchen, a young woman who “finds herself pulled into a conspiracy involving bizarre experiments” in the German Alps. Also featuring genre standouts Dan Stevens and Jessica Henwick, CUCKOO is an exciting combination of talents that seems guaranteed to earn a cult following.
OMNI LOOP
Pride of Ireland Ayo Edebiri co-stars with Mary-Louise Parker in writer-director Bernardo Britto’s OMNI LOOP, a sci-fi comedy-drama that sounds like a fascinating inversion of a macro cosmological phenomenon into a micro character study and back again. Parker plays Zoya, a woman who “has been diagnosed with a black hole inside her chest and given a week to live. But what the doctors and her family don’t know is that she has already lived this week before.” Zoya and Paula (Edebiri) work together to travel back in time to give Zoya a second chance at life. The possibilities for bittersweet hilarity seem endless, which is only fitting for a film that appears to play so much with the boundaries of time and space.
TIMESTALKER
Another time travel comedy, TIMESTALKER, premieres courtesy of writer-director-star Alice Lowe. Perhaps best known to horror-comedy fans as Madeleine Wool in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Lowe follows up her 2016 directorial debut PREVENGE with a tale of love, death, and reincarnation. Lowe plays Agnes, a woman who keeps falling in love with the wrong man and then dying a horrible death, only to repeat the same mistake with the same guy in a different time period. It’s a premise whose comedic potential is exceeded only by its relatability.
BIRDEATER
Making its international premiere at SXSW after debuting at the Sydney Film Festival, BIRDEATER is the first feature from screenwriter Jack Clark, who co-directs with Jim Weir. Irene (Shabana Azeez) joins her fiancé Louis’s (Mackenzie Fearnley) bachelor party in the Australian outback, but “the celebration soon becomes a feral nightmare.” BIRDEATER sounds like a harrowing examination of gender and power, serving as a potentially bleak counterprogram against the previous entry.
AZRAEL
Bona fide scream queen Samara Weaving stars in AZRAEL, a brutal-sounding horror thriller from director E. L. Katz and writer Simon Barrett. Running a tight 85 minutes and featuring no dialogue, the post-apocalyptic film tells the story of “a devout cult of mute zealots” as they hunt down Azrael (Weaving), an escaped prisoner whom they want to sacrifice “to pacify an ancient evil that resides deep within the surrounding wilderness.” Barrett also wrote YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST, two impeccable studies in tension and pacing, so AZRAEL has the potential to be another genre gem.
Tags: Action Film, Austin, Dev Patel, Festivals, Film Festivals, Horror, Mary-Louise Parker, Nicolas Cage, Samara Weaving, Sci-Fi, South By Southwest, SXSW 2024, Sydney Sweeney, Texas, Thrillers
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