Five free movies to stream now
By BRANDON YU
Fear lives in the moment before the terrible thing arrives, not after. In anticipation of Halloween, this month’s selections center on the blackened pit of dread in your stomach.
The sense that things are not right stalks these films. It’s a difficult atmosphere to effectively cultivate and sustain, so it’s no surprise that these films are overseen by master directors like David Lynch and Lee Chang-dong. More frighteningly, the feelings speak to a lurking anxiety that increasingly pervades life beyond the screen.
‘Inland Empire’ (2006)
If you’ve seen enough movies, you eventually reach the point when you feel you’ve seen it all, or at least some version of it. Then you watch this vision of David Lynch’s id unleashed, a film unlike anything you’ve ever encountered.
It’s pointless to explain what it’s about. Instead, I’ll offer a simple guide, or warning: Buckle up, and let go — of logic, narrative and earthly comforts. Lynch’s final film isn’t so much a work to understand or even enjoy, but to experience and ultimately appreciate for its singularity. Suited bunnies and maybe the most petrifying jump scare of all time (yes, more than the infamous “Mulholland Drive” diner one) — this is a three-hour nightmare trance that is perhaps the purest distillation of a bad dream ever put on digital.
Digital is the key word, not only because Lynch uniquely harnessed the form, shooting on a dated hand-held camcorder to reflect back an ugly, pixelated distortion of reality. It’s also because you can draw a clear line from its off-kilter register of vague, oppressive anxiety to our modern sensibility of the absurd — in everything from comedy to graphic design, online content to television — that ripples across our post-digital culture today. (Stream it on Tubi.)
‘Klute’ (1971)
Part of director Alan J. Pakula’s so-called Paranoia Trilogy, “Klute” might be the underrated best of the bunch, animated by an unease that is as intoxicating as it is skin-crawling. You feel it as you watch Jane Fonda strutting inside a sweatshop, delivering a monologue into sexual play as cinematographer Gordon Willis’ camera slowly pulls back like its own act of foreplay. In the darkness beyond her, is someone else watching?
This is a stone-cold classic of visceral atmosphere, but it is most memorable for Fonda’s Bree, a call girl whom Klute (Donald Sutherland), a private eye investigating the disappearance of his friend, turns to for help in the case.
Remarkably, Pakula’s film takes stock noir concepts — the prostitute in distress, the cop who wants to save her, the high-powered client who’s revealed behind closed doors — and turns them into people living in a New York City that is terrifying and heartbreaking. At its center is Fonda, at once self-possessed and wounded, a master of desire and loneliness — until she’s not, and those features fester into shocking violence. (Stream it on Tubi.)
‘Burning’ (2018)
What exactly is the creeping foreboding in Lee Chang-dong’s masterpiece circling around? The bubbling resentment of an ever-yawning class divide? Thwarted masculinity and repressed male rage? The shadow of authoritarianism?
It’s maybe all of those, and whatever else you might see. Like great literature (Lee, himself a writer of fiction, adapted “Burning” from a Haruki Murakami short story), its mysteries and subtexts are its most richly alluring qualities. An elegantly controlled work of atmosphere, Lee’s film snatches you up and never lets go, as it pinballs between suspicions around its central triangle: Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a son of a farmer; Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), the former neighbor he reconnects with; and Ben (Steven Yeun), the cosmopolite who appears suddenly with an air of worldly, perhaps sociopathic inscrutability.
Who Ben is and what danger he’s hiding are in some ways the wrong questions in a film that doesn’t so much as wrong-foot you as withhold easy answers. Instead, all it reveals is troubled people responding to an increasingly alienating world. (Stream it on Tubi.)
‘Suspiria’ (1977)
Watching “Suspiria” sometimes feels as if you’re watching a technicolor fantasy beamed in from hell — or at least Dario Argento’s version of the underworld. In Argento’s imagination, evil exists at its most gleefully lurid: rich blood-reds, a score that sounds like a hypnotic curse and acts of death designed like fun house art installations.
The film is a descent into madness that is both streamlined and stylistically maximalist. It immediately kicks into high gear when Suzy (Jessica Harper), a dancer, hops on a doomed taxi ride to the Italian ballet school she’s traveled for, and ends almost the moment everything goes up in a blaze.
It’s a vision of horror that most of the genre never bothered to follow, but maybe should have: terror that is not drably grim, but instead a space of untethered play, where imaginations run wild and fevered. (Stream it on Xumo.)
‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ (1975)
Against the backdrop of the harsh Australian landscape, a class of girls, languorous and corseted in white, spend a hot day at the base of Hanging Rock. At the heart of Peter Weir’s film is this spellbinding image — as unnatural as a premonition, and yet strange enough to be a dream. That’s how Weir sees this story, based on a 1967 novel also titled “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” about a group of girls who go missing around the volcanic formation, documenting it as an almost spiritual occurrence.
What follows is a story of the sorrow and confusion that penetrates the town, and the madness that comes from such a harrowing mystery. Weir’s ethereal imagery and the film’s haunting final moments around the disappearance cast the story as something otherworldly. To imagine it differently would be too disquieting. (Stream it on Xumo.)
