The 10 Most Weird Films Of 2016

5. Evolution | Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution features mothers giving birth to young boys without sexually conceiving them. In a ritual that features them dancing around on the beach symbolizes their ovulation and the starfish (which also reproduces asexually) feasts on ruminants. As we know that curiosity is the mother of all invention (I’m pretty sure ‘they’ said it), one of the boys wishes to investigate why their mothers feed them squid ink calling it medicine. While being an unsettling yet profound tale of motherhood, Evolution takes bizarreness to next level. The boys are constantly operated in a hospital that is supposedly turning them into ovulating creatures that can continue the cycle of Evolution thereon.

4. The Ornithologist | Director: João Pedro Rodrigues.

João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist is a homoerotic film about self-discovery. But it’s not too easy on the eye. Its symbolism can just be conflicting when you can call it just another art-house experimental film but is in actuality a biblical epic. Featuring high stake POV shots where the birds look back at you and see through your head and heart, a homo-erotic sex scene with Jesus himself, a journey through the condors of the world which are constantly looking to castrate you, turn you into a part of their animalistic museum and wreck your head for their ritualistic freedom.

3. Cosmos | Director: Andrzej Żuławski.

Welcome to the land of the obscure. Dead birds are found in the backyard and people talk like Donal Duck. But wait, that’s not where Żuławski’s farewell note to cinema end. There are three endings to this film that is supposedly too much cinema for its 103-minute runtime. One of those ending goes way into the closing credits and makes you want to question everything that you had just seen. Cosmos is a baffling work of art. It irrevocably satirizes the very idea of a thought. It questions the chaos that goes inside one’s head, incapsulating almost everything there is in the world. Everything that can’t be expressed in any sort of non-crazy form. Żuławski’s Cosmos is a scrutinizing tale of colorful characters and strange reactions.

2. The Greasy Strangler | Director: Jim Hosking.

Remember the last time you were so grossed out that you just wanted to get into a pit and die? Well, Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler might just do that to you. While there’s a really scattered family message in the film, most of it is meant to hurt your senses where you wish to pluck your eye-balls and kill someone who recommended you to watch this. Misogynistic, psychotic and weirdly disturbing, The Greasy Strangler features nudity of the most off-putting order. There are overlong shots of the most awful looking penises in cinematic history. Constant repetition of dialogues that becomes instant catchphrases and a self-referential, loathsome character that walks around in the most disgusting looking gelatinous goo. Oh, and did I tell you about the score? It makes you feel like you are playing the best video game ever. One that you aren’t supposed to play.

1. Staying Vertical | Director: Alain Guiraudie.

A man sodomizes, then euthanizes an elderly man in front of his baby as progressive rock holler in the background. That’s just the tip of the iceberg in Alain Guiraudie’s absolutely bizarre, offhand surrealistic trip through a series of undefined goals and weirdness. The protagonist in Staying Verticle is a distant cousin of Kramer from Seinfeld. The film starts with him trying to pen-down a screenplay and goes down territories that even God wouldn’t imagine. To account the weirdness in Staying Verticle, Guiraudie has a therapist who lives on the other end of a boat ride. She uses veins to cure what is wrong with Leo’s personality which even he doesn’t understand. There are wolves, sexual encounters that don’t make sense and to top it all – There’s an instant cut to a live childbirth.