What I Watch

My taste in films is difficult to explain. I’ve tried a few times. It never quite lands cleanly.

It’s not a genre. It’s closer to a pattern, a film that feels like it’s asking something, not just showing you something. You finish it, and instead of moving on, you sit there for a minute. Sometimes longer.

The pattern shows up most clearly in what I think of as “one-room films.” Small cast. One location, or close to it. No spectacle to hide behind. No world-ending stakes. Just people in a room and something unresolved between them that refuses to stay quiet.

The Man from Earth is basically a conversation. One man claims he’s ten thousand years old. A room full of academics try to believe him or dismantle him. No effects. No flashbacks. It holds purely on the tension between what’s being said and what it implies.

Coherence does something similar with a dinner party and a passing comet. The setting barely moves. The tension builds slowly, then all at once, and it builds from what the characters realise about the situation, and about themselves. That’s usually the part that matters anyway.

What films like this strip away is distraction. No action to lean on. No visual noise to carry weak writing. You’re left with story in its simplest form. Which makes it very obvious, very quickly, whether the story actually works.

That’s the common thread in most of what I watch.

Even when the scale increases, I’m still looking for the same thing. Inception and Tenet work for me because the action is tied to the idea. Remove the logic, and the spectacle collapses. The Gentlemen is different, lighter, sharper, but it earns its place through writing, not scale.

Then there are the psychological ones. Fight Club, Circle, The Belko Experiment. Same underlying question in different forms, remove the structure around people, apply pressure, and see what’s left. Not a comfortable question. Probably why it works.

Parasite and The Big Short do something adjacent, but at a systems level. The pressure isn’t immediate. It’s economic, structural, slow, and somehow more unsettling because of that.

For TV, the standard doesn’t change. Black Mirror. Dark. Shows that leave you with something unresolved. Not confusion, that’s easy, but a question that doesn’t quite settle when the episode ends.

That’s the pattern.

And when I find something that fits it, I go deeper than I probably need to. Essays, rewatches, breakdowns. I follow the thread until I understand what it was doing and why it worked. Then something else comes along and resets the whole process.

Fair trade.