Venice Film Festival: Dark, Strange, and Beautiful

A Venice-inspired route through cinema that feels moody, elegant, unsettling, and visually precise — films where beauty often arrives with danger, desire, loneliness, or moral unease.

This playlist features Poor Things, The Shape of Water, Roma, Joker, TÁR, The Favourite, Suspiria, Under the Skin, Black Swan, The Wrestler.

Films in this playlist

  1. Poor Things — Yorgos Lanthimos · 2023. Venice embraced Lanthimos at his most lavish and strange: a film where costume, lensing, performance, and production design turn liberation into a feverish fairy tale.
  2. The Shape of Water — Guillermo del Toro · 2017. A Venice-launched modern fable that uses genre beauty to make otherness, touch, and desire feel political and intimate.
  3. Roma — Alfonso Cuarón · 2018. Its Venice triumph came from a different kind of beauty: controlled frames, quiet observation, and memory rebuilt through sound and movement.
  4. Joker — Todd Phillips · 2019. A controversial Venice winner that turns comic-book material into a grim psychological character study built from performance, score, and urban decay.
  5. TÁR — Todd Field · 2022. A Venice-launched study in precision: long scenes, cold spaces, elite culture, and a performance where every gesture feels like strategy.
  6. The Favourite — Yorgos Lanthimos · 2018. Venice helped frame this as costume drama turned acidic: fisheye lenses, cruelty, comedy, and bodies trapped in ornate rooms.
  7. Suspiria — Luca Guadagnino · 2018. Its Venice presence fits the festival’s taste for elegant discomfort: dance, politics, flesh, ritual, and dread fused into one severe visual object.
  8. Under the Skin — Jonathan Glazer · 2013. A Venice competition film that feels less like science fiction than a cold sensory experiment about looking, predation, and human vulnerability.
  9. Black Swan — Darren Aronofsky · 2010. Opening Venice was fitting: this is beauty weaponized into pressure, where dance cinema becomes psychological horror.
  10. The Wrestler — Darren Aronofsky · 2008. A Golden Lion winner that finds strange beauty in ruin: handheld realism, damaged masculinity, and a body treated as both spectacle and wound.