Ah, August, that strange transitive period in between the crowd-pleasing summer blockbusters and the fall film fest frenzy. This month’s Watchlist This! column—in which we highlight movies that the Letterboxd community and crew are most jazzed for—includes some lovely oddities. Amongst them: a “Craven-meets-Hooper” psychosexual horror, an Indonesian serial-killer thriller and a paranormal story literally named Oddity. 

There are also some more feel-y, less freaky choices: last year’s festival darling Mountains is finally getting a theatrical release, as is an unconventional father-daughter documentary that would make for a great (and weepy) double feature with the recent Sing Sing. Picks in this edition come from Mitchell Beaupre, Robert Daniels, Brian Formo and Justin LaLiberty. Happy watchlisting!

Mountains

Written and directed by Monica Sorelle.
In select theaters August 23.
Music Box Films

Immediately after Monica Sorelle’s Haitian, Miami-set film Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), won audience awards at BlackStar, New Orleans and Florida Film Festival, and took home the Narrative Grand Jury prize at New Hampshire, Charlotte and Memphis Indie Film Festival. The Film Independent Spirit Awards even bestowed Sorelle with the “Someone to Watch” award and nominated its lead actor Atibon Nazaire for Best Breakthrough Performance.

After a sterling run, general audiences through Music Box Films can soon experience Sorelle’s deeply personal and political film. Xavier (Nazaire) arrived in America with dreams of upward mobility. Now, he tears down the former dream houses that populate his Little Haiti neighborhood in the hopes of one day buying a new house for his devoted wife Esperance (Sheila Anozier) and his rebellious second-generation son, Junior (Chris Renois). At every turn in Sorelle’s tender, intimate picture, Xavier is stymied by false promises and the oncoming threat of gentrification.

In a five-star review, Juancy attests, “Miami’s cinematic language has been completely reframed and elevated by this powerful and yet seemingly quiet film.” Jordan praises, “Personal, political, smart, emotional, familial.” James offers a personal perspective, calling Mountains “super poignant”: “As someone who was born and raised in Miami, a lot of my experience has had to be grappling with the fact that I won’t be able to live and die here. There’s a lot of grief and I felt seen by this movie.” RD

PLUS: Monica Sorelle and Robert Colom share the films that influenced Mountains

From minute one, Strange Darling is pulsing with adrenaline, combining the visceral grind-house excitement of Death Proof with the chamber drama power play of Sanctuary. A disted narrative structure may appear a little gimmicky at first, but rest assured it only further serves to toy with your understanding of how these two figures are enmeshed with one another as their one-night stand goes devilishly haywire. If you don’t believe me, take it from horror icon herself, Barbara Crampton, who writes, “You think you’re watching one thing and you’re feeling like you know where it’s going but then the tables turn on the viewer and you are seeing something completely different.”

A bonus treat: Strange Darling is produced by Giovanni Ribisi, the great character actor who got the coolest “and” credit in cinema history this summer in Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, but that’s not all. This is also Ribisi’s first film as a cinematographer, and you can feel the rush of an artist clearly in love with the visual language of the medium thanks to the striking look he achieves, shot entirely on 35mm. As Crampton attests, it’s “beautifully shot with cool angles and framing which greatly enhanced the story.” MB

PLUS: JT Mollner and Giovani Ribisi share the films that influenced Strange Darling

Daughters

Directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae.
Streaming now.
Netflix

As Brent Buell—the playwright who ran a prison theater program that inspired the film Sing Sing—said in our red carpet video, in the United States, “we call our prisons correctional facilities [but instead] they’re camps of criminal punishment.” In that Colman Domingo-starring drama (featuring many former inmates who went through the theatrical rehabilitation program in the prison), theater is the only outlet for the inmates to become more than a prisoner in the view of the outside world and in their view of self.

In Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s stunning, Sundance award-winning documentary Daughters, that outlet is a father-daughter dance. The Daddy Daughter Dance is a local program that attempts to, for a single day, rectify some of those punishment rules and attempt to turn the prison into an actual correctional facility. The incarcerated men prepare for weeks via group therapy sessions about what fatherhood meant to them before they were imprisoned and what it means now. The final session will be about what it means going forward, with all the men who participated holding each other able.

The program, started by mother-activists, hinges on a theory: not only would the children gain a better sense of their father but the father would work even harder to not recidivate and find themselves back in prison. For the men who have participated in the Daddy Daughter Dance, the data tremendously proves their thesis.

It’s searing, yes, but, importantly, it’s also joyous. Thesunnyloaf calls Daughters “such a gut-wrenching and tender doc… [that] shares with us the hope for growth and healing. Not a dry eye in the theater, from start to finish.” In tone, Brandon writes that it “recalls the Apted 7 Up docs, but with more poetic interludes,” and Rafa says that it’s a “devastatingly moving documentary that walks the very tricky line between managing to humanize incarcerated men without overlooking the shattering effects of their absences in the lives of their daughters.” The result, according to KYK, is a “full-body sob.” BF

Borderless Fog (Kabut Berduri)

Directed by Edwin, written by Edwin and Ifan Adriansyah Ismail.
Streaming now.
Netflix

On the border between Malaysia and Indonesia, a series of gruesome murders have struck, with police organizations stuck in a bureaucratic battle between whose responsibility the investigation should be. The task ends up falling to Sanja (Putri Marino), a detective still grappling with the sins of her past. Letterboxd like Jimbo and Aldi have likened Borderless Fog to procedural series like The Bridge and True Detective, with its moody slow burn emphasizing the murky atmosphere through which Sanja traverses. Raven calls out another recent serial-killer smash, writing, “It’s basically Indonesian-style Longlegs! But this has way more disturbing things in [it] and [a] way darker aesthetic with the location it was shot in.”

Anyone who has seen director Edwin’s previous picture, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (an unbelievably cool movie title), knows his strength when it comes to visuals, and, indeed, Borderless Fog looks exquisite. He and cinematographer Gunnar Nimpuno (The Night Comes for Us) shroud this mood-heavy story with soupy fog and swampy terrain, as Sanja and her team’s investigation leads them deep into the heart of the jungle. The environment perfectly parallels the haze through which the criminal’s unpredictable methods keep them guessing, and the guilt of Sanja’s past that persistently plagues her mind. Permata writes, “It’s about knowing where to look, knowing where to stand despite the fog that might blind you,” while declaring, “this one made me feel alive again.” MB

As Letterboxd member—and horror filmmaker—Travis Stevens writes, Oddity is “a well-constructed, shot, plotted and acted tale of terror, revenge and the supernatural ability to see the truths that others keep hidden.” What makes Mc Carthy’s film work so well is its reluctance to commit to being one specific thing: it’s a ghost story, tale of mysticism, revenge saga and home invasion picture all rolled up into 98 minutes of searing dread.

In a Violent Nature producer Naturebean, “won’t be sleeping tonight.” JL