The October London Film Festival comes toward the end of the year, and so, like FilmEkimi in Istanbul, it has the privilege of curating the best films that have come out that year. This year’s London selection had some of the year’s favorites like "Fatherland," "Woman Unknown," "Bunker" and "Minotaur." Organizing festival attendance around the day job means making hard decisions. I have managed to miss "Minotaur" twice this year, but I am counting on Andrei Zvyagintsev’s popularity to see it when it comes to general release.
Like with all festivals, I tried to walk that fine line between seeing the new hits before everyone else and seeing films that I am unlikely to see anywhere else. My festival started with the failure to see "Elsinore." The film is about the actor Ian Charleson and his last role, playing Hamlet at the National Theatre, a couple of buildings away from the British Film Institute. I have been a faithful audience member of the National Theatre since 1997 and felt entitled to a ticket, but after waiting in the returns line for 10 mins for the Royal Festival Hall screening, I was told that the house was full. This is what you get for trying to see a festival film that has Andrew Scott as the lead. But equally, as Scott is the lead, there is hope that I will manage to see it when it comes to the cinemas.
This disappointment of the morning was alleviated in the evening when I secured tickets for "A Girl Unknown," directed by Zou Jing, at the more modest screening room of the ICA. Jing’s film follows the fortunes of a Chinese girl who lives with three different families in different stages of her youth, due to circumstances connected to the country’s now-abolished one-child policy. Although the subject matter could easily lend itself to melodrama, Jing’s treatment is very measured, and one gets a panorama of Chinese society of today.
It does not mean much when I say that Asian cinema does well at festivals, because Asia is a huge landmass that comprises all the countries from Türkiye to Iran and India and Japan, all with their distinct cinematic styles. But it is clear that East Asia is in the ascendancy, with Korea leading the charge. Since the rightful success of "Parasite" (2019), Korean films have been riding this wave, and last year one of the galas at the Royal Festival Hall was Park Chan-wook’s "No Other Choice" (2025), which left me cold, as did this year’s much-awaited "Possible Love" by Lee Chang-dong. Both films deal with the fallout of Korea’s declining industries and so risk being "worthy" – which in "Possible Love" becomes metafictional as the story kicks off with a documentary maker holding interviews for a film about laid-off workers. I had seen and loved Chang-dong’s "Burning" (2018) almost a decade ago, but in that one the characters were meticulously worked, whereas in "Possible Love" they read like allegorical figures.
The festival’s Asian offering naturally included the usual Iranian films whose descriptions sounded like I’d watched them before. Honorable mention goes to "Lali," where "Joyland"s (2022) producer Sarmad Khoosat takes the helm as director in a tale of an unlikely marriage story that is both a symphony of color and a nightmare reminiscent of David Lynch. Another favorite of mine was the Philippines-Taiwan-Japan coproduction "Moonglow," a noir where good people commit crimes for justice.
There are a couple of actors who had multiple films at the festival, and one of them was Johnny Flynn, whom I liked for his unassuming roles in "Detectorists" (2014-2022) and "Vanity Fair" (2018), and who seems to have become a media darling while I wasn’t looking. He plays the legendary (for those of us interested in U.K. theater) Richard Eyre in "Elsinore" (2026) and Dostoyevsky in "Idiot(s)." Not a bad billing at all. I am very happy to have managed to see the latter because it is full of my favorite things. I am naturally drawn to the life stories of authors, and the film concentrates on Dostoyevsky’s stay in Baden-Baden, spa towns being one of the favorite settings for novels and films. Flynn is great as the Russian writer, but Aimee Lou Wood is greater as his wife Anna. Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska depicts them as a very modern couple with a very contemporary way of speaking, and with her no-nonsense commentary on Dostoyevsky’s irredeemable habits, Lou Wood steals the scenes. This is no small feat when she is often sharing the screen with one of my favorite actors, Vicky Krieps.
Another actor who had multiple films at the festival was Javier Bardem, and both his films open with a sequence of close-ups of his face. My favorite is Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s "The Beloved," where he plays a director who reconnects with his estranged actor daughter after 13 years and tries to give her her biggest break. Bardem is a devil in it, and the whole film is about how much the world will tolerate the excesses of a genius. While the Sorogoyen film manages to go deep into the motivations of the characters and stays there, "Bunker" tries to open with important issues and fails. I might have had lower expectations for the film had we not seen so many videos of the audience at Venice giving standing ovations to Bardem and Cruz, who play a professional couple whose marriage is being assailed by the "important issues."
My personal favorite of all the films I watched was "The Face of Horror," which, in its experimentality and flair, reminded me of last year’s "Lady" (2025). I was susceptible to the charms of this film from the start because I am teaching medieval literature this fall, and "The Face of Horror" is a medieval horror film subverting the character of "the knight" as all good medieval romances do. The film is shot in Technicolor, with exaggerated acting reminiscent of silent films. Director Anna Biller informs the audience in the opening credits that her style equally owes a debt to the Japanese operatic form kabuki. It is the perfect British festival film: It cannibalizes many different cultures and forms and entertains the informed viewer with several layers of intertextuality. "The Face of Horror" is unlikely to find general release, and it’s the very reason why I need to keep going to film festivals, to see how filmmakers are experimenting with the form.
