In terms of cinema, 2023 is the healthiest year of this decade so far. While 2024 is turning out to be a musically blessed year with many artists pushing the envelope—for example, and most notably Magdalena Bay with “Imaginal disk”— the year is turning out to be one of the driest years for “cinema”. Just one look at 2023, and it’s enough to make one realise that 2024 doesn’t even hold a candle in front of it. However, there’s still some hope left with the festival films coming out in the next few months as well as the anticipated new releases. Read on to find 10 of the most underrated films of 2023.
With 2025 shaping up to be an incredibly loaded year for movies, and 2023 already having cemented itself as a champion for now, 2024—though not without its merits—is inevitably getting sandwiched, and there are plenty of explanations for that, though our primary concern here is to shed light on some super cool films from 2023 you can’t afford to miss out on.
This article could’ve easily been Top 20 or 30 or 40 or even 50 overlooked films of 2023 (yes, it simply was so loaded), but we’ll spare you the pain of scrolling by listing some honourable mentions: Heroico (David Zona), L’innocent (Louis Garrel), The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu), Riceboy Sleeps (Anthony Shim), Fremont (Babak Jalali), Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt), Shortcomings (Randall Park), Linoleum (Colin West), Three of Us (Avinash Arun), The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno), Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An), The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green), Aatmapamphlet (Ashish Avinash Bende), Concrete Utopia (Um Tae-Hwa), Scrapper (Charlotte Regan), The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (William Friedkin), The Peasants (Hugh Welchman, DK Welchman), Next Sohee (July Song), The Breaking Ice (Anthony Chen) and All Ears (Liu Giayin) to name a few.
As for the 10 most underrated films that you can’t sleep on, here goes the list:
The Most Overlooked Films Of 2023
10) ‘Sleep’ (dir. Jason Yu)
In the words of Bong Joon Ho, “the smartest debut I’ve seen in ten years”. A wild domestic thriller tackling sleepwalking, laced with signature Korean dark humour, featuring a knock-out performance by Lee Sun-Kyun and Jung Yu-Mi. The movie embraces its madness and has one of the boldest jump cuts in recent memory, it has quickly become my go-to psychological thriller recommendation to anyone who digs the genre.
9) ‘Autobiography’ (dir. Makbul Mubarak)
2023 was really an impressive year for directorial debuts and this is one of the finest examples. Mubarak’s Autobiography is a slow burn that takes its time in contextualizing events w.r.t. the history of the country, embracing the show-don’t-tell approach for depicting the story. It’s a crime thriller that demands us to come down at its wavelength with that calm pacing, drizzled with, at times intentionally unpleasant, dread throughout its runtime. It failed to make it to the International Oscars shortlist last year, nonetheless a deserving film that needs to be checked out
8) ‘The Artifice Girl’ (dir. Franklin Ritch)
A thought provoking sci-fi—purely conversational in nature—that makes us re-examine the state and effects of artificial creativity and artificial evolution, leaving us with an inevitable question, whether it’s possible for artificial intelligence to play a part in knowledge creation. Watch out for Franklin Ritch!
7) ‘Burning Days’ (dir. Emin Alper)
Definitely one of the pleasant surprises of 2023. Ambiguity can often mask the lack of meaningfulness in a film, this Turkish corruption noir-thriller uses ambiguity in a way that enhances its meaningfulness. An accomplished work both on technical and narrative level. Movies relying on rhetoric ideology to convey a sentiment can often lose the sauce, this one’s an exception. Drizzled with mild doses of surrealism, with paranoia on the verge of running amok, the movie at every turn toys with its spectator’s expectations and successfully subverts them.
6) ‘Tótem’ (dir. Lila Avilés)
This movie does not prevaricate, it confronts. The fragmented story comes together to deliver a gut punch of the highest order. The film leads to such a cathartic denouement, that it had me bawling, that opera scene alone knocked my socks off. The film communicates the real intricacies of emotions (a dichotomy in perspective between a child and an adult), every character in this film comes off as a conscious person rather than some inanimate stand-in. The subject is sensitive, yet it never acquiesces to invoke sentimentality in order to manipulate the emotions of spectator. The childlike innocence is counterbalanced by adulthood and their ability to overlook (or make peace) with the inevitable. One of the most memorable films of last year.
5) ‘Blue Giant’ (dir. Yuzuru Tachikawa)
An underdog/coming-of-age movie, that has the ferocity of Whiplash and playfulness of Sing Street, while never feeling a derivative of either, based on a manga by the same name. The friendship/brotherhood between the three central characters forms a solid emotional core of the film. It’s a movie about perseverance. The wonky CGI is goofy at times but the imagination of animators at display makes it easier to overlook that. I’m not a textbook jazz enthusiast but this movie conveys the magic of jazz with so much passion, that you’re compelled to appreciate the beauty of it all. Easily one of the best-animated films of 2023.
4) ‘Red Rooms’ (dir. Pascal Plante)
Perhaps the most surprising film of last year, the opening shot of the film with Dominique Plante’s score just engulfed me and the movie kept on getting darker and weirder, the way a techno psychological thriller should be. While Longlegs turned out to be quite an underwhelming experience, this movie, unlike the aforementioned film, quenched my thirst for the genre. The film is shot masterfully, the sound design is crisp and performances are on-spot. It unfolds initially as a gripping procedural courtroom drama centered around a man accused of the heinous crime of killing teenage girls on the dark web. The film, however, is not about the killer but about Kelly-Anne (focussing more on the spectator rather than the killer) who in context to her online handle “The Lady of Shallot” is a remote character in this story. Her obscured identity becomes a haunting cipher that gradually reveals the disturbing depths of her obsession with this whole ordeal. The withholding of information in regard to her character creates a palpable sense of horror. A treat for fans of this genre, it just scratches that particular kind of itch.
3) ‘Trenque Lauquen’ (dir. Laura Citarella)
A movie to get lost in. Trenque Lauquen unfolds in two parts, across 12 chapters that undergo a transition from realism to metafiction. The movie begins as a mystery thriller and flits from one genre to another seamlessly–mystery, thriller, romance, sci-fi etc.–sprinkled with drops of surrealism, the levels of which are elevated in the second half of the film. The titular town in which the narrative takes place is itself meticulously developed that you can’t help but feel a part of it while watching the film; that aspect ratio change differentiating the phenomenon of watching and consciousness of watching, the whole concept of peeping-tomism turned on its head. The first half of the film leaves us introspecting and then barges in the second half ascending the whole thing, going to unexpected places without losing touch with reality. This is a movie that makes it easier for us to surrender ourselves to the world it builds, not making this whole experience grandiose but rather intimate. It is a movie that focuses on showing not telling, hearing not yelling; it makes itself clear that answers to mystery are not the destination but what matters truly is telling the story.
2) ‘Close Your Eyes’ (dir. Victor Erice)
After decades of inactivity, Victor Erice is back and he’s back so strong. The film is a contextually rich ode to cinema without it forcing or intending to be an ode to cinema. It carries the whole notion of camera-capturing time on its sleeve and rummages it to fruition in a rather intimate way. Mortality and the fragility of memory are dealt in a way that feels self-reflexive and personal. The almost three hour long movie never feels overlong, the close-up shots in the film are of sheer beauty. In a way, it possesses a level of rich metatextualism. The film unravels itself layer by layer and the deeper it goes, the more soulful and moving it gets. More people need to see this.
1) ‘About Dry Grasses’ (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Given the Academy’s streak of consistently ignoring Ceylan, its omission didn’t surprise me, it did however truly baffle me. The film is an amalgamation of micro-narratives, a talk-fest that allows every character in this movie to feel like a conscious person communicating real feelings. The protagonist himself is an unreliable narrator, his flaws come into the limelight when his actions start contradicting his ideals. The three hours of this dialogue-driven film never feels tiring, on the contrary, I wanted it to run a little longer.
It would be a spoiler if I mention it, but there’s one very bold scene at around 2.5 hours into the movie that left me flummoxed in the best way possible. A quick look at the synopsis of the film will give you the idea of what the film is about, but that’s not all, it beautifully branches itself, externalizing a wide range of deep human emotions with the help of brilliant dialogues. The individual and the universal are frictionlessly combined in this film. The cinematography is spectacular. Merve Dizdar winning Cannes Best Actress for her role is one of the coolest things the Cannes Jury has pulled off in a while. Criminally underrated film that you can’t afford to miss out on.
The beauty of 2023 lies in the balance it achieved by delivering quality blockbusters and pleasantly surprising indie films, a healthy year for well-established directors, debut directors and actors-turned-directors, the hope is still alive for 2024, but I’m already salivating looking at the explosive nature of 2025 for movies.
Thanks for reading this article on the Top 10 Most Underrated Films of 2023. For more, stay tuned here at Feature First.
