Film
An Awfully Big Adventure
A 1995 drama about a starry-eyed teenage girl who joins a struggling Liverpool theatre company in 1947 and discovers the ugly realities behind the curtain during a production of Peter Pan. It's tender and corrosive by turns, anchored by Alan Rickman's quietly sinister performance. A film about losing innocence that doesn't pretend innocence was ever safe.
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The Killing of a Sacred Deer2017
A similar descent into moral corruption, where good intentions curdle into something toxic. Yorgos Lanthimos crafts an atmosphere of mounting dread that catches you in its web. Deeply unsettling.
But It's deliberately opaque and the pacing is glacial. Some viewers find it pretentious rather than profound, and the finale divides people hard.

Mulholland Drive2001
David Lynch's Hollywood nightmare explores similar territory: ambition, performance, the predatory nature of the industry. Visually stunning and endlessly rewatchable, though you'll need to surrender to its logic.
But It's a puzzle box that refuses to fully lock. Three hours of cryptic dreamlogic can feel like three hours of someone being deliberately obscure.

The Master2012
Paul Thomas Anderson's portrait of manipulation and charisma, where an older man exerts a magnetic hold over a younger one. Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are combustible together. Gorgeously shot.
But It's glacial and oblique, and the relationship dynamic—while the point—is deeply uncomfortable to sit with for two and a half hours.

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The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Heavenly Creatures1994
Both films centre on adolescent girls entering a world of adult corruption, where intimacy and performance become indistinguishable, and where innocence is weaponized rather than protected.
Peter Jackson's visceral portrait of two teenage girls whose intense friendship warps into something dangerous. Like An Awfully Big Adventure, it's about youth and how quickly affection can become destructive. Formally inventive and psychologically precise.
But It's based on a real murder and doesn't soft-pedal the violence. The fantasy sequences are surreal and crude in a way that's deliberate but divisive. Some find the film collapses under the weight of its own technique.

More like this (7)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner1962
A young British outsider at odds with authority figures and institutions. It captures that same post-war grey landscape and the clash between youthful rebellion and adult compromise. Bracingly honest.
But The pacing feels deliberately resistant. It's a film about stubbornness made in a stubborn way, which some find austere rather than moving.

Prick Up Your Ears1987
Gary Oldman as Joe Orton, a playwright destroyed by his own appetites and the people around him. It's about the theatre world, sexual politics, and how genius and toxicity can live in the same person. Darkly funny and tragic.
But It's explicitly sexual in ways that might feel gratuitous. The relationship at its centre is poisonous, which is rather the point, but some find it exhausting.

Under the Skin2014
Scarlett Johansson hunts men in the Scottish Highlands as an alien predator. It's a meditation on vulnerability and the male gaze, wrapped in science fiction. Hypnotic and genuinely strange.
But There's almost no dialogue and it moves at a drift. Some scenes are lengthy and repetitive. It requires patience and tolerance for ambiguity that not everyone brings.

My Beautiful Laundrette1985
Stephen Frears' portrait of young ambition and queerness in 1980s Britain. It's funny, sexy, sad, and structurally dense—a lot in 97 minutes. The script by Hanif Abdulkhani is alive on every page.
But The dated video quality and low budget aesthetic put some people off. It's also explicitly about desire and class conflict, which can feel raw rather than entertaining.

Damage1992
Jeremy Irons as a respectable politician undone by an affair with his son's fiancée. It's about how quickly civilization peels away, how desire overrides everything. Passionate and dark and genuinely tragic.
But It's melodramatic and the film itself seems to judge no one, which some find morally vacant. The psychosexual content is explicit and it doesn't earn pathos for any character.

A Doll's House1973
Like An Awfully Big Adventure, it uses a theatrical frame to expose the performances we give in intimate spaces, and the violence of pretence unravelling. Both are about the theatre as a space where truth can't survive.
Joseph Losey's adaptation of Ibsen's play, with Jane Fonda as Nora. It's a formal, theatrical, deliberately artificial exploration of marriage and identity. Cold and precise where most adaptations are warm. Radical.
But It's visibly stagy—not cinematic in conventional ways. The performances are mannered and the whole enterprise feels airless, which is deliberate but exhausting. Fonda's accent is peculiar.

The Servant1963
Both explore how sexual power operates beneath social hierarchy, where charm and performance mask predation, and where younger, ostensibly weaker figures understand manipulation better than their supposed superiors.
Joseph Losey again, this time with Dirk Bogarde as a chauffeur who inverts the power dynamics of his employment through slow, erotic manipulation. It's a masterclass in how authority is performed. Claustrophobic and brilliant.
But It's glacially paced and fundamentally claustrophobic—three people in townhouse for two hours. The sexual content is implicit but heavy. It feels like watching someone else's unbearable relationship.

People
Cast
Alan RickmanP.L. O'Hara
Georgina CatesStella
Hugh GrantMeredith Potter
Alun ArmstrongUncle Vernon
Peter FirthBunny
Prunella ScalesRose
Rita TushinghamAunt Lily
Alan CoxGeoffrey
Edward PetherbridgeSt.Ives
Nicola PagettDotty Blundell
Carol DrinkwaterDawn Allenby
Clive MerrisonDesmond Fairchild
Directing
- Mike NewellDirector
- Laerke Sigfred PedersenScript Supervisor
Writing
- Beryl BainbridgeNovel
- Charles WoodWriter
Production
- Susie FiggisCasting
- Hilary DwyerProducer
- Philip HinchcliffeProducer