Some of the best films of 2024 have this one thing in common
After the mammoth year that 2023 was, you’ve got to admit, 2024 felt like a rather middling year at the movies. But there’s some saving grace. You see, some of the best movies of 2024 have one thing in common—their range in telling the stories of women.
Take some of the biggest hits, both at the box office and in terms of popularity—Wicked, Challengers, Anora, Moana 2, Inside Out 2, Twisters, Emilia Pérez, The Substance—and you’ll find that they’re all stories about interesting, fascinating, complex women. These stories, whether they’re being told with a female gaze (Coralie Fargeat, Payal Kapadia, Halina Reign, Marielle Heller, Arkasha Stevenson) or by male directors (Pedro Almódovar, Luca Guadagnino, Pablo Larraín, Mohammad Rasoulof), seem to make powerful statements through incredibly nuanced female characterisations at their crux. What’s more, these characters aren’t typical iterations of cardboard-like tropes; they’re emotionally rich and unabashedly real.
Of the films that have received nominations this season for the top honours including Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and so on at the Golden Globes and have generated major Oscar buzz, roughly half are stories about women.
These films explore myriad facets of the female experience—feminism in a war-torn country (The Seed of The Sacred Fig), women against patriarchy (The Piano Lesson), the beauty ideals that imprison our best selves (The Substance, The Last Showgirl), gender dysphoria (Emilia Pérez), women in male fields (Santosh), ambition (Challengers), female friendships (All We Imagine As Light, The Room Next Door), motherhood (The Wild Robot, Nightbitch), female desire (Babygirl, Nosferatu, Love Lies Bleeding), depression (Hard Truths), strength (I’m Still Here), the misunderstood diva (Maria, Armand), and more.
It’s fascinating and thrilling that these stories flipped the tropes and broke the usual moulds within which women are represented on screen. I mean, this was the year we got a feminist Lord of The Rings movie that actually passes the Bechdel test. So go figure! More importantly, the films this year were refreshingly unafraid to explore taboos like female sexuality and desire across genre while speaking the truth about what it means to be a woman, even the darker parts that we don’t normally acknowledge.
In Anora, we got Mikey Madison’s Ani owning her job as a sex worker, a retelling of Pretty Woman and Cinderella that ditched the romantic fairy tale notions for something real, and infinitely better with its commentary on class, gender, and sexual promiscuity. Magnus von Horn’s German psychological horror, The Girl with the Needle, also about a woman pregnant with the child of rich man out of wedlock, is a grim take on a fairy tale in the same vein.
In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman’s Romy gave into her kink of submission with a much younger employee, opening up discussion about consent. In The Idea of You, Anne Hathaway’s Celeste dated a young pop star closer to her daughter’s age, defying the norm, and making the film the most-watched on Prime Video. And who can forget what the Challengers trio of Tashi, Art, and Patrick have done for the ménage à trois! But for me, one of the most unforgettable experiences remains Rose Glass’ sapphic body horror romance thriller Love Lies Bleeding with Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian’s which offers a hitherto unseen visceral portrayal of female desire and queer love on screen.
Even one of the final entrants of the year, Robert Eggers’ vampire outing Nosferatu subverts the Mina Harker trope we know to give us Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, in all her dark witchy glory, who has much more agency than her previous iterations as she faces the indomitable vampire Count Orlok. Horror as a means to speaking harsh truths is the best thing about the genre. And this year, in fact, we women ate well.
It’s rather telling that in 2024, we got not one but three horror thrillers speaking such harsh truths about motherhood, bringing forth the uglier, more difficult side of child bearing and rearing that often gets sidestepped. Childbirth is painted as this beautiful experience. But films like The First Omen and Sydney Sweeney’s Immaculate—with their gory visuals, the pronounced threat to a woman’s life while giving birth, and all the ways that religion and patriarchy try to exert their control over a woman’s body—were terrifying naked reminders of the price women pay to bring life into the world.
The most shocking and absurd of them all, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch ft. Amy Adams finds a unique premise to show us how much motherhood can sap a woman of her identity and reduce her to simply ‘Mother’. At the same time, the heartwarming animated film The Wild Robot could tell us just how much motherhood can change your programming and transform you completely, so it’s okay if you don’t want to be a mom because it’s not for everyone.
Some of the best performances of the year—Mikey Madison, Danielle Deadwyler, Fernanda Torres, Renate Reinsve, Cynthia Erivo, Carla Sofía Gascón, Pamela Anderson—have come from films that reiterate that a woman’s personal struggle is always also political and against a society that continues to undermine her and rig the game against her. But this was also the year that showed the power of female friendships and sisterhood in the face of a hostile, grim world—Hard Truths, Wicked, All We Image As Light, The Room Next Door, Santosh, Emilia Pérez, and His Three Daughters to name a few.
Perhaps, one of the biggest statements that films this year were making (and which I’d like to think began last year with the unprecedented response to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie) was about how womanhood is a spectrum that needs to be talked about more openly an unapologetically out there. There are so many things that are the undisputed reality of every woman but are only whispered amongst girlfriends from the fear of being judged or perceived as too trivial in the grand scheme of things. But we don’t see films about masculinity and the male gaze hesitate or hold back, do we? It’s been like that for ages now. So why should boys have all the fun?
In the spirit of the year of Glicked, the time is ripe for more such nuanced stories about women to enter the arena and defy gravity after all.
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