I Stand Alone
You knew a Gaspar Noé movie had to be on this list somewhere, right? I bet a lot of you thought it would be Irreversible, but I have talked that movie enough at this point. On the other end of the spectrum, I think Enter the Void is beautiful, and though I know it may fuck some people up, it does not deserve a place on this list. What does deserve a place on the list, however, is Noe’s first feature, I Stand Alone.
This is a movie about “The butcher” (no, really, he gets no name). A man who is on a downward spiral so dark, you get caught up in at as a viewer and spiral uncontrollably with him. He lives with his daughter, whom he raises alone, and begins to develop incestuous thoughts for. At one point, he mistakes menstrual blood for “rape blood” and ends up killing a guy he assumes raped her.
This results in some jail time for him, and things only get sicker and sicker from there. You have seen people going down dark roads in films before many times, but I Stand Alone is different. It feels way more palpable, because the stuff that goes on in this movie is really going on somewhere, right now.
It is a heavy, brutal, unrelenting film, and it will mess you up pretty badly. Especially considering how it ends.
