NO-GOOD, GREEDY, MESSY, AND OTHERWISE IMPERFECT QUEER GIRLS: For pride month, a collection of movies about queer girls who beat to their own drum. Unabashedly nonsensical, messy, unpalatable, greedy, or maybe even problematic, these women are not interested in matters of hair-splitting accuracy of labels or likable queerness, but instead opt to embrace the mess of intuitively following love, sex, and selfhood. Love sometimes happens on the muddy turnpike of a New Jersey freeway, the cashier line of a Target, or the apartment next door to a 1930s mental institute. -Veronica Phillips
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)
Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is a glorious and free flowing mindfuck of gender and sexuality. The film is filled with burgeoning queer women who find themselves in the bodies of John Malkovich, or who want to be with the women they love only if they are in the body of John Malkovich. The film is involved with women who are flaky, undecided, and who swing back and forth between who they want and how they want them. Women who are unabashedly high maintenance. Absurd in tone, but ultimately choosing the revelatory and liberating embrace of queer womanhood, Being John Malkovich is a messy queer girl must.
CHASING AMY (1997)
Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy is a divisive pick. For some, Alyssa’s (Joey Lauren Adams) decision to leave her long term label of lesbianism to be swept off her feet by comic book artist and resident “Nice Guy” Holden (Ben Affleck), is a frustrating representation of lesbianism and bisexuality (with some even saying it’s like playing into some cliches around lesbians “just needing to find the right man”). To others, Chasing Amy celebrates a fluidity of sexuality, with a focus on how to make queerness work for you instead of making it palatable to the imagined public. What matters most to me is Alyssa’s insistence throughout the film that her sexuality is for her and her only; it’s not a topic of discussion for any boyfriend or lesbian bestie that thinks they know what’s best, it’s something intuitively felt and celebrated within herself.
KAJILLIONAIRE (2020)
Named after a homeless lottery winner who her parents hoped would write them into his will, Kajillionaire protagonist Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) is, simply put, an off-putting little lesbian. She speaks in a low, overly-affected drawl and lives with her neglectful parents in an office space. No one really loves her right until Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) comes on the scene, and even then, Melanie can only woo Old Dolio by promising to fix her mommy issues, to sweep in with pancakes and birthday presents and expressions of affection. Kajillionaire is about being loved exactly how you need to be loved, at the exact right time.
THE FAVOURITE (2018)
The Favourite is a terse and calculated dive into a rapidly fluctuating power dynamic set in the 18th-century private chambers of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Torn between the stern, overbearing, but perhaps ultimately loving, hand of Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), and the plotting, seductive, encouragement of excess and pleasure that is the new lady-in-waiting, Abigail (Emma Stone), Anne technically holds all the power while being is so easily swayed by the way the beautiful and entrancing women in her life involve themselves in her matters — and thus the matters of the entire country.
THE HANDMAIDEN (2016)
What begins as a story about 1930s swindlers and crooks infiltrating a wealthy manor quickly turns into a twisty-turny lesbian affair between the impoverished Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri), who has spent her life thieving and finessing to live, and the wealthy, delicate Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), who has lived her life under her perverse uncle’s thumb, never leaving the estate she has been raised on since she was five. Sexually complex, swinging between erotic and off-putting, The Handmaiden is an ode to self-preserving women, and their potential to be softened (in their own dark, sharp, brilliant ways) in the face of lesbian love.
INTO THE INFERNO: June is a hot, roiling month. Mia Farrow’s Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby is initially told her baby will arrive on June 28. I used to wear this negligible fact as a badge, because that’s my birthday. Nevermind that in the film, her baby arrives earlier. I would, with great preamble, tell anyone unfortunate enough to become an interlocutor that Rosemary’s baby almost had the same birthday as me! The spawn of Satan almost had the same birthday as me!
June is a wild month, the heat apt to drive us crazy, to behave in ways that can only be insufficiently justified by the crawling layer of sweat that accompanies us into every interaction, the incessant hiss of insects. As the world moves in a devilish haze about us this month, I invite you to join me in revisiting the following films that explore what it looks like for evil to roam about us in all its fleshy glory. Here you’ll find innumerable deals with cunning devils, carnal infractions, and delicious madness, all playing out beneath the lambasting glare of hellish fire.
June tends to bring out the worst in us, and isn’t that worth celebrating? - Alisha Mughal
The Devil’s Advocate (1997)
Replete with classic lit iconography and the glimmering, blood-soaked opulence of the New York wealthy, Devil’s Advocate is a feast. Monologues about humankind’s effete goodness and God’s hypocrisy abound, so much so you might find yourself wondering whether it might not be more fun to choose the selfish route in life. Al Pacino plays the devil, and Keanu Reeves is his not-so-innocent protege with a natural bent for the exploitative bending of truth. The film turns the American judicial system into a playground where it seems nigh impossible for goodness to survive. Rife with lust, unabashed as it savors all the brightest and garish colors, this film is a damned good time, with Pacino, Reeves, and Charlize Theron turning in performances that dance on the brink of, and then bathe in, madness. Devil’s Advocate is lush and unforgiving and riotous and unhinged, but most importantly, it’s almost persuasive as it paints the world with a sensual, if at times campy, realism. There truly is nothing else quite like it.
Needful Things (1993)
If Devil’s Advocate is merely laced with irony, then Needful Things is submerged in it, soaked to the bone with a Gogolian sensibility. Based on a novel by Stephen King and directed by Fraser C. Heston (Charlton Heston’s son), the film stars Max von Sydow as an itinerant, charming, and mysterious peddler of anything the heart could desire. Ed Harris is Alan Pangborn, the sheriff in Castle Rock, the small town that is Sydow’s Leland Gaunt’s latest haunt. As the denizens of Castle Rock simultaneously receive their dream items and descend into chaotic and antisocial behavior, neighbor turning on neighbor, Alan becomes increasingly suspicious of the snickering and preternatural Gaunt, who lurks at the town’s center like an all-knowing shadow. This film is tremendously tongue-in-cheek, even if it is heartbreaking, and Sydow is spellbinding as the mischievous Gaunt.
Fallen (1998)
What is it about this movie? It’s so clinical with its procedural element and confessional narration borrowed from old-school Noir, so mournful with its wailing horns and sulking lens. But it’s also so harrowingly sad, so quietly gutting, dolorously cynical. Starring Denzel Washington as a detective confounded by a series of occult murders that replicate the modus operandi of a killer he’s already apprehended and who has been put to death by the state, this film is more dire and viscerally trenchant than it is ironic, seeing hellish evil for the unavoidable plague among us that it seems to be.
The screenplay is agonizing, written as it is by Nicholas Kazan, and accordingly, characters are so stunningly wrought that it’s impossible not to love them. All the performances here are brilliant, especially Washington’s turn as the skilled and irreverent Detective Hobbes — there’s something restrained about him even as he goes through hell, it’s a knowing composure he possesses that doesn’t make this film cold, rather it makes us love it and him all the more. Hobbes is composed, world-weary, but glassy-eyed, from all the tears he’s holding in. Fallen offers a coming to terms with an evil that we’ve always known to exist. The evil here enters scenes and flesh not with dramatic and sepulchral pomp and circumstance, but with a kind of blunt doom, and for this reason this it’s remarkable.
Angel Heart (1987)
Perhaps more heartbreaking than Fallen, Angel Heart is absolutely gutting as it depicts the unraveling of a private detective in post-war America. Mickey Rourke delivers a brilliant performance as Harry Angel, a private eye in 1950s New York who has a tough time with names, hired by Robert De Niro’s Louis Cyphre, a greasy, mysterious man decked out in old-world austerity and wealth. Cyphre asks Harry to find a singer named Johnny Favorite, a man Cyphre claims disappeared before he could honor a contract. Harry moves from New York to Louisiana as he searches for Johnny Favorite, and as he gets closer and closer to the mysterious singer, his own sense of reality and self become increasingly muddled and unreliable.
Angel Heart plays with our understanding of ourselves, offering an unrepentant look at the lengths to which we are willing to go to achieve what our hearts desire. This is a thrilling and mesmerizing film, its mystery endlessly captivating, and its score almost suffocatingly cardiac; but most of all, Angel Heart and Rourke’s performance in it are resoundingly lonely, in the best way possible. After watching it, one feels compelled to reckon with the self in an effort to try and excise the evil we’ve allowed within us. I think the film’s wisdom is that it allows us to see that the evil is, regrettably, inextricable.