Five international movies to stream now

“Sweet Dreams”

By Devika Girish

Intriguing dramas in rural settings dominate this month’s picks.

‘Sweet Dreams’

I’ve been eagerly awaiting a new film from Ena Sendijarevic ever since her debut feature, “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” blew me away in 2019 with its mordant, sharply observed tale of a Dutch teenager reconnecting with her estranged Bosnian father and his homeland. Her follow-up, “Sweet Dreams,” which premiered at festivals in 2023, is finally available to stream in the United States — and it confirms Sendijarevic as one of the directors to watch in world cinema today.

Set in Dutch-ruled Indonesia in the early 20th century, the film is an exquisitely staged historical drama about a colonial family’s downward spiral after the death of their patriarch. Jan (Hans Dagelet), the owner of a sugar plantation, dies suddenly one day. No one’s all that upset about it: His neglected, corseted wife (Renée Soutendijk) seems relieved, and Jan’s son Cornelius travels in an almost gleeful haste from the Netherlands in the hopes of selling the estate and making some money. The only problem is that Jan has left all his wealth and property to the young son he has sired with Siti (Hayati Azis), the family maid.

The air is thick with humidity, mosquitoes and the rebellious grumblings of the Indonesian workers. The Dutch characters, sweating profusely in their aristocratic attire, are both sinister and clownish as they desperately try to maintain control. With a keen eye for both atmosphere and the violent absurdities of colonial domination, Sendijarevic shows us how brittle the veneer of so-called Western civilization really is when power and profit are at play. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Asog’

Sean Devlin’s Philippines-set film is a queer drama in the truest sense of the term — it defies all labels, irreverently mixing genres and tones to create something proudly original. “Asog” follows Rey Aclao, aka Jaya, a trans TV anchor and performer, on a road trip to Sicogon Island, where she’s hoping to compete in a drag pageant. Jaya’s life and career were destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan, which swept across the Philippines in 2013, taking thousands of lives and destroying homes and infrastructure. Jaya is joined on her journey by Arnel Pablo, a high school student who lost his mother to the typhoon, and is visiting his father to collect money for her death commemoration ceremony.

Along the way, the two meet several other people whose lives were drastically affected by Haiyan — including the residents of Sicogon Island, who for years have been fighting a real estate company that swept in after the storm in an attempt to drive them out and build a luxury resort on their ancestral land. All the characters in “Asog” are real people who play themselves, but Devlin (who wrote the film with Jaya and Pablo) crafts a fable-like film, with animated interludes, slapstick comedy, flamboyant agitprop and many other flourishes that allow the subjects to tell their stories on their own terms — with humor, rage and imagination. The film ends on a bittersweet note of solidarity and resistance, but its real victory came after it premiered at festivals: The acclaim that it garnered led to the real estate company compensating 784 displaced families on Sicogon Island with $5.1 million in reparations. (Stream it on Film Movement Plus. Rent it on Amazon Prime Video.)

‘The Beast Within’

Kit Harington stars in this gothic English spin on the werewolf myth. The action unfolds in rural West Yorkshire, where a family of four — 10-year-old Willow (Caoilinn Springall), her mother, Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), her father, Noah (Harington), and her grandfather, Waylon (James Cosmo) — all live in what seems like enforced isolation and constant menace. Willow is our entryway into the film’s world, and for much of the movie’s first half, we’re enveloped in the same fog of confusion as her, quietly watching and listening as her mother carts her dad off every month to a secret location, animals disappear from their farm, and her parents whisper and argue behind closed doors.

We soon learn that Noah is the bearer of a hereditary curse, and that loving him comes at a price. But mysteries remain: Is the horror he emanates only the supernatural kind, or is there something more banal — and thus scarier — in the pull he exerts over the family? “The Beast Within” is a creature feature that operates like a chamber drama; there are no innocent villagers who are terrorized, or fields that are rampaged. Instead, the danger lies within the home, in the everyday monstrosities of toxic men. (Stream it on Hulu.)

‘Moon’

Mixed martial arts fighter Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) has reached the end of her competitive career, and in her small Austrian hometown, future prospects look bleak. When we meet her, she’s coaching two half-hearted young girls who accuse her of intruding on their personal space; later, she’s arguing with her sister, whose house she is crashing in. So when a job offer arrives from abroad — the scion of an ultrarich family in Jordan wants her to train his sisters for a month — it seems like a no-brainer. She is flown out and put up in a fancy hotel. Then she’s made to sign a nondisclosure agreement — which is the first clue that something’s amiss.

Directed by Iraqi-born Austrian filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub, “Moon” is a taut thriller of few words and mounting tension. The palatial mansion in which Sarah’s clients live feels like a mausoleum: quiet and ghostly. The girls she is tasked with training are shifty and nervous. There’s no internet in the house, and strange whispers and cries can be heard. Ayub is skillfully coy with exposition — details emerge in bits and pieces — and puts us squarely in the shoes of her befuddled heroine, an outsider who can tell that something is wrong but knows too little, and has too little power, to do anything about it. Driven by Holzinger’s raw, restrained performance, “Moon” upturns white-savior tropes, instead painting a gutting portrait of futility in the face of injustice. (Stream it on Mubi.)

‘Suro’

When Helena (Vicky Luengo) and Ivan (Pol López) leave the city to move to the Spanish countryside, they dream of an idyll. Helena has inherited a house surrounded by a cork estate from her aunt, and the couple plans to raise their soon-coming baby in this sun swept rural village, with fresh air and golden fields. But when they hire a local foreman to harvest the cork, their bubble begins to burst. Ivan, who prides himself on being equitable, tries to insinuate himself among the workers, but they only view him with wariness; in their eyes, he is the “landowner’s husband,” a term loaded with unspoken judgment. Then there are the Moroccan immigrant laborers employed by the foreman, whom Ivan and Helena try to help, only to worsen problems and deepen parochial rifts. Meanwhile, forest fires lurk on the horizon, threatening to burn it all down. Shot and performed with a gorgeous naturalism, “Suro” subtly, intelligently, exposes the naiveté of its protagonists, city-bred do-gooders whose idealism conceals an oblivious narcissism. (Stream it on Tubi.)