A Plea for Alternative Indie Film Adaptations
Both stories question identity and reality, but while Dick fits existential philosophy into a short story, Frisch lets his protagonist ramble into details of made-up stories full of outdated American clichés that don’t seem to contribute any meaningful aspect to the actual story whatsoever.
Even we’d swap the scenery, I’ll always prefer Philip K. Dick to Max Frisch, although the author of Fire Raisers (Biedermann und die Brandstifter) isn’t famous for nothing. I’d enjoy watching Stiller as a martian in a cheesy space opera, and a serene mid-century black-and-white adaption of Total Recall might add an unexpected new angle to Dick’s subversive ambiguity. But that would be too niche for contemporary arthouse, and that’s one of many contemporary cinema’s problems.
What are Contemporary Cinema’s Problems?
Cinema didn’t die because of video tapes and satellite TV. Cinema didn’t die because of Netflix. There are still plenty of cinemas, from small independent insider tips to festive halls with giant screens, showing plenty of new films every year, including a variety of ambitious arthouse productions. However, films like After the Hunt, Babygirl, or What Marielle Knows fail to live up to their praise and expectations and I don’t really understand the reason why. Even more so after generations of ambitious and experimental film makers like Agnès Varda that regularly resurface in special screenings and retrospective text books while the modern film industry seems trapped in a tunnel of box office marketing logic.
Missed Opportunities for Modern Coming-of-Age Cinema
What Marielle Knows seemed like a promising discovery in last year’s Berlinale film festival program. Not to be confused with the 2012 Julianne Moore drama What Maisie Knew, based on a book by Henry James from 1879. Both films don’t only have a similar title. Both center on a similar setup about a girl witnessing her parents’ selfish conflicts. I left Marielle slightly disturbed and disappointed for several different reasons.
What exactly is this about? An adolescent single child of a German bourgeois couple develops clairvoyant abilities so they can’t hide their midlife crisis lies anymore. If you’re a parent, that might sound familiar, even without taking clairvoyance literally. Haunted by unwanted insights into her parents’ intimate lives, this could have been a brilliant story about teenage troubles. However, it’s a disturbing dystopia revolving around self-centered, self-pitying people’s first-world problems, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with After the Hunt and Babygirl as well. Worse in this case, What Marielle Knows looks like an uninspired German TV drama wasting all of the big screen’s artistic options that there are even without a big budget.
After the Hunt and Babygirl feature well-known Hollywood actors and I’m confused if they failed to make the films more modern, authentic and exciting or if it’s on purpose that they didn’t. Beyond the boring visual staging, the supposedly ambiguous and complex story of After the Hunt tends to depict Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), the only black main character in the whole cast, as a mischieveous carreerist while focusing on the established white professor’s role as both victim and perpetrator. There are worse films, but how can film makers waste the potential of the better ones so badly? And where to watch inspiring alternatives?
Where can the ordinary Audience Discover Inspiring New Films?
As ordinary viewers and occasional readers, how can we find new inspiration without getting lost in nerdy niche knowledge? When I’m looking at a program of a film festival like Berlinale, I find it hard to tell from the description what to choose. I’m no professional film critic with plenty of time and money. I could go to random screenings where there are still tickets left or wait for what mainstream and arthouse cinemas choose to include in their schedule after the film festival. Surprise success films like Poor Things prove that works at least sometimes.
Regularly following film announcements, ready to travel across the city or across the country if we don’t live in Berlin or a university town, we need to be quick and dedicate an early afternoon to our cinematic ambition, as uncommon material often only screens at two o’clock in a remote suburb, while the arthouse evening schedule focuses on a handful of movies that fit common clichés and expectations.
Sex and the Cinema
It’s been a while since my last blog post about movies, but there are welcome exceptions to my dilemma occasionally. Anora was acclaimed and popular, and while I found it silly and clichéd, it was still fun to watch while highlighting often overlooked topics such as a sex worker’s personal life and Brooklyn’s “Little Odessa” area at Brighton Beach. Several theatres have extraordinary programs like the queer “MonGay” series or experimental film festivals. Cinematic magazines issues or free cinema newsletters usually announce spcial programs early in advance. Art-savvy viewers should also look beyond traditional movie theatres, like the Pictoplasma Conference, a specialist event for character-driven creativity, offers donation-based animation film screenings open to the general public, where you can see visual work that rarely reaches the cinema scene.
Streaming Options for Watching Indie Films that You Missed
Streaming and DVD video are further options to discover visual art and storytelling apart from the mainstream. You can try to filter out overhyped pretentious movies on popular streaming sites or search for independent communities and film producers or check public libraries’ online film streaming options which often include unusual material rarely seen in the regular program.
Other Independent Film Reviews and Recommendations
Another independent film that made it from the festival to the main program, at least in selected arthouse cinemas, Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail, follows a working class mum, who refuses mandatory retirement as an elderly person, become a refugee and a rebel. The satire on a neoliberal surveillance society celebrates the lifes and struggles of peculiar charcters living and working at the border of the Amazon river. The film’s original title, o último azul, refers to blue snail slime said to open the doors of psychedelic perception and give a human clairvoyant abilities if they dare to drip a drop of it into their eye.
Equally far from the beaten storytelling tracks, but situated right in the middle of England, Andrea Arnold’s film Bird tell the story of twelve-year old “Bird” Bailey and her father Bug making the best out of living in precarious conditions. A modern fairy tale, a social study, and a collection of small moments that the girl captures with her cell phone camera, and an upbeat “is it too real for you?” musical collage of supporting amateur actors outtakes. The film, described as a coming-of-age fable that captures the struggles and resilience of its young protagonist with both authenticity and magic realism, surely deserved more attention than cinemas decided (not) to give it.
Relevant Films without Depictions of Violence
There are many films that do matter but that I still wouldn’t recommend everyone watching unless you’re a hardened activist or you need a brutal wake-up-call to the world’s cirisis and their victims. Still you’d better watch one of those documentaries and semi-fictional war and refugee stories than the abundant imaginary crime stories and historical tropes with sensationist shock and horror like Agnieszka Holland’s Franz K., the latest of the extremely numerous arthouse films dedicated to Franz Kafka. A contemporary critic called Kafka a pervert reveler of horror (“Lüstling des Entsetzens”) and that’s what I suspect many modern-day authors and film makers to be. Don’t watch that film unless you have already been spoiled by watching too much crime and horror before.
How to filter out films that contain horror and violence?
To filter out films with disturbing violence or horror scenes, check the less obvious details in cinema booking apps. They did a good job to make trigger warnings as unobtrusive as they were allowed to, but the cinema staff assured me that there are trigger warnings when taking a closer look. Anyway, a there are many good and relevant films without depiction of violence, I will focus on those if I’ll even have enough material for another article dedicated to movies. Frankly, I prefer reading books in the foreseeable future to spare myself further disappointing trips to the cinema.
Watching Recommendations and Films to Avoid
Let’s rate and recap the films mentioned in this posts:
- Bird (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- The Blue Trail (2025) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Anora (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Total Recall (1990) ⭐⭐⭐
- Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey Into the Desert (2023) ⭐⭐⭐
- The Stranger (2025) ⭐
- I’m not Stiller! (2025) *
- What Maisie Knew (2012) *
- After the Hunt (2025) 👎👎👎
- Babygirl (2024) 👎👎👎
- What Marielle Knows (2025) 👎👎👎👎
- Franz K. (2025) 👎👎👎👎👎
(*) I didn’t watch What Maisie Knew (yet) and I didn’t watch the film about Stiller either, but I tried to read the book and based on the film trailer and critical reception I suspect I’d give it a thumbs down in my ranking.
What can The Stranger tell the Current Audience?
If you’re interested in the author Max Frisch, I strongly advise you to watch Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey Into the Desert to consider his spouse ‘s perspective. Bachmann ‘s desert journey with her lover, Adam Opel, might seem as boring as Stiller’s ramblings but at least someone had an ambition for costumes, light and camera, which is also the only valid reason to watch Francois Ozon’s The Stranger, an affected black-and-white film that also clings to its literary source too much to matter much in the present.
The only possible reason why Stiller and The Stranger didn’t cause cancel culture shitstorms I can imagine ist that they’re so boring that every critic fell asleep before they could realise that there’s anything wrong and it’s 2026 not 1956. Maybe authors like Albert Camus and Max Frisch are still worth reading now, but so are other authors less obvious and less likely to be found on canonical must-read lists that seem like a safe-bet for yet another literary adaption or biopic.
Scholars insist that Stiller wouldn’t work as a short story and that the lengthy details are essential to the novel. I disagree. Films like After the Hunt or What Marielle knows had potential and so does Stiller, but the novel sounds at least as old as it is, and its message is drowned out by the unbearable ramblings of the unsympathetic protagonist.
Inviting Mr. White to Open Up to New Narratives
Stiller is just as little “the book of our time” as the overrated films’ stories. The whiny self-pity of smug white people seeing their privileges crumble fits in well with the whining of today’s journalists and bar room regulars. Reinventing himself as “Mr. White”, Stiller is still not free from clichés, but at least becomes capable of criticising himself and his culture from the perspective of others. But instead of repeating the same clichés over and over again, the creative industry should better discover and promote new stories and new narratives that the world has plenty to offer.
Clashing Differences, Augure, and Medusa Deluxe are films that didn’t get much attention although at least Medusa’s British slang salon story is a bold, funny and stylish Indie film ready for a bigger audience, while I still didn’t manage to watch Baloji’s Augure. In a way, I’m still Mr. White as well, and I’m telling myself that I’m working on it.
