35 Disturbing Foreign Films to Watch, from Gaspar Noé to Takashi Miike

“You Won’t Be Alone” (2022)

Goran Stolevski’s elliptical folk tale “You Won’t Be Alone” unfolds like a dream without a map, and so to try and parse it in certain terms is like recounting a dream to somebody who wasn’t in on it. That’s high praise for a horror-adjacent movie that weds some of the genre’s most elemental tropes to a weird and poignant parable of a loveless witch terrorizing a 19th-century Macedonian community because of her own disappointments in love and motherhood.

Stolevski has concocted a fantastically gory method to the witch’s madness, as, in order to take on the body of a new host, she must imbibe their organs into her own body. This makes for some queasy body horror sequences involving bloody intestines and giblets shoved into a chasm in the new witch’s chest, and suckling on the gushing wounds of carcasses and corpses. —RL

“The Innocents” (2021)

Eskil Vogt’s “The Innocents” is a film about childhood as much as it is about murder, sharing as much DNA with “Boyhood” as it does “The Bad Seed.” Specifically, it’s a film about contemporary childhood and, in a dangerous world that forces kids to grow up faster and faster, whether innocence is even still possible.

But instead of juxtaposing childhood innocence against adult evils, it seamlessly combines the two. The kids we’re supposed to fear may have been born with deadly powers, but they’re simply children in the process of growing up. They play and explore, they experiment and make mistakes. They demonstrate the capacity for profound kindness and cruelty in equal measures. And when they kill people using telekinesis, it’s fair to wonder if the incidents are as preventable as a child falling while running with scissors. —CZ

“Hatching” (2022)

Hanna Bergholm’s “Hatching” — about a teenage Finnish girl who decides to nurture and grow a strange (and eventually very large) egg that she finds in a forest — chronicles all sorts of pains and pleasures of womanhood, from motherhood to girlhood and every experience in between, but it’s also concerned with something else that transcends gender: the realization that adults aren’t infallible. Tjina starts to understand that truism just as she’s also growing into a woman herself, complete with her own misbegotten foray into surrogate motherhood.

Siiri Solalinna, appearing in her first onscreen role, does serious work here, ably flipping between Tjina’s stone-faced demeanor when trapped alongside her wretched family to hair-trigger nerves when attempting to deal with girls her own age to the deep care she shows for her growing new friend. When the egg hatches, Solalinna happily marries all the different aspects of Tjina. She’s overjoyed at having even a massive, nearly feather-less bird-thing as a friend (it’s a wonderful bit of creature design that stuns both Tjina and the audience), terrified at what caring for it will entail, and eager to keep the entire thing from her nosy parent. Fun for the whole family ensues. —KE

“Titane” (2021)

While “Titane” may always be “the car sex movie” in the minds of many cinephiles, Julia Ducournau’s serial killer film contains more than enough substance to justify its shock value. After establishing herself as an unhinged auteur worth watching with “Raw,” Ducournau cemented her status as a master of her craft with this unapologetic story of a father ostensibly reuniting with his son while a serial killer is on the loose. The film hits the perfect midnight movie sweet spot, allowing itself to be incredibly bizarre without ever feeling gratuitous. If anyone had doubts about Ducournau being one of the most interesting artists currently working in film, “Titane” erased them. —CZ

“Grotesque” (2009)

You can love “Grotesque” or you can hate it, but nobody can deny that Koji Shiraishi’s film lives up to its title. The horror flick tells the story of a Japanese couple on a first date who are kidnapped by a doctor who proceeds to torture them. A lot. And that’s pretty much it. “Grotesque” is a film that knows exactly what it is, and succeeds because it quickly establishes a simple-yet-believable plot before cramming as much mutilation as humanly possible into its 73-minute runtime. The film deserves props for its unapologetic commitment to torture for the sake of torture, constantly ramping up the creative sadism until it reaches its ridiculously over-the-top ending that should satisfy even the most discriminating exploitation fans. —CZ

“Tenebrae” (1982)

After proving himself as a master of the giallo genre with films like “Suspiria” and “Inferno,” Dario Argento went meta with “Tenebrae,” which tells the story of an author dealing with the fact that a serial killer was inspired by his books. The film was poorly received due to the heavily censored version released in America, but once cinephiles got their hands on Argento’s much more disturbing cut, it became a horror classic. No understanding of the Italian horror legend’s filmography is complete without at least one viewing. —CZ

“Battle Royale” (2000)

Kinji Fukasaku’s “Battle Royale” attracted plenty of controversy upon its initial release for its depictions of graphic violence against (and committed by) 15-year-olds. The film tells the story of a dystopian future where junior high students are forced to fight each other to the death as part of a misguided attempt to curb teenage crime. It took over a decade for the brutal film to be released in the United States, but it quickly became a cult classic. While pop culture is littered with knockoffs that water down the idea (looking at you, “The Hunger Games”), “Battle Royale” succeeds because it takes its premise to its logical and insanely fucked-up conclusion. Nobody who watches should be surprised that Quentin Tarantino frequently cites it as one of his favorite films of the 21st century. —CZ

“Marebito” (2004)

Takashi Shimizu’s horror film tells the story of a thrill seeker who investigates an urban legend about a mythical society beneath the Tokyo subway system. When he ventures below the city, viewers are treated to images of a disturbing underground world of ghosts and humanlike creatures who walk on all fours. The film only gets darker when he finds a human girl living in the subway and adopts her as a pet. While reviews were mixed, it remains disturbing even by contemporary standards. —CZ

“After Lucia” (2012)

Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco turned his anger toward society’s ills from incest in his first feature “Daniel & Ana” to bullying and sexual exploitation in “After Lucia,” a queasy parable about how quickly the worst thing imaginable can go viral, but also about how rotten kids can be when left to their devices (literally, their devices). Franco’s chilly style, detached but with absolutely no drip of irony, merely watches as a 17-year-old woman’s life falls apart after a drunken encounter is filmed and distributed to her classmates. And that’s just the start.

“Audition” (1999)

There’s not much left to say about Takashi Miike’s 1999 film, which has been interpreted as both feminist and misogynist, about a dating setup that curdles into a nightmare. Revisiting the film time and again (if you can stomach the grand finale) reveals deeper layers to its traumas, exposing Eihi Shiina’s Asami as a victim of child abuse wronged by Japanese fatherhood, and now seeking retribution for centuries of evildoing.

“Cure” (1997)

Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s elevated serial killer story “Cure” has inspired filmmakers from Bong Joon Ho to Bill Hader, who named it one of the 10 best films of the 1990s on a list for IndieWire. Kōji Yakusho plays a police detective with marital problems who is tracking a series of bizarre murders seemingly perpetrated by a killer who can will others to commit murder. Kurosawa’s atmospheric masterpiece delivers gruesome imagery, but it’s the philosophical rabbit hole into which it goes in the final stretches that make it memorable. The film is less about who did it, or why, but about our own innate capacity for destruction. —RL

“Black God, White Devil” (1963)

Glauber Rocha’s balls-to-the-wall Brazilian yarn might first come across as a “worthy” effort of the Cinema Novo movement — films about poverty, neocolonialism, and corruption spearheaded by theorists turned filmmakers. In the struggle of Manuel (Geraldo del Rey) and Rosa (Yoná Magalhães), it first seems like that. Except it becomes like “Bonnie and Clyde” crossed with a Spaghetti Western when Manuel kills his boss, they go on the run, and then join up with a revolutionary priest’s militants. The priest in question has turned to cult-like mysticism in his class war, and even sacrifices an infant on an altar to advance his cause.

At a screening a few years ago at New York City’s MoMA, the infanticide elicited a wave of audible gasps and nervous laughter. What’s shocking after that moment is how fun the movie becomes, with the introduction of a Leone-style bounty hunter named Antonio das Mortes (Mauricio do Valle, who got his own spinoff film from Rocha in 1969). —Christian Blauvelt

“Calvaire” (2004)

A backwoods breakdown gone diabolically awry, “Calvaire” boasts harrowing acts of rape and torture in a deserted rural town in Belgium. Laurent Lucas plays a stage performer who finds himself marooned among a gaggle of deranged locals who, it turns out, are preparing him for a kind of bizarre sexual ritual. —RL

“The Celebration” (1998)

Decades before “Another Round,” Thomas Vinterberg, along with fellow Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, was carving out a little movement known as Dogme 95 that involved stripping films down to their barest elements and depleting them of any Hollywood flash. The first film to emerge from that movement, “The Celebration” boasts a high-profile lineup of Danish actors (including Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen, and Paprika Steen) in telling the story of a patriarch’s (Moritzen) 60th birthday party undone by sexual assault accusations. Shot in Sony Handycam to give a documentary-like feel, “The Celebration” is an emotionally terrorizing movie. —RL

“Come and See” (1985)

Director Elem Klimov fought Soviet censors for a decade to release his blistering anti-war film that plunges you into the horrors of inhumanity. Klimov turns his eye on the Nazi occupation of Belarus through the eyes of a teenager, Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), who, after joining the Belarusian resistance, witnesses the horrifying atrocities inflicted by Nazis upon Eastern Europe. Painful, but essential viewing. —RL

“Cries and Whispers” (1972)

The arthouse of the 1970s was transfixed by the conflagration of sex and death, and its crowning figure hailed from Sweden. Nearly 50 years later, “Cries and Whispers” feels like Ingmar Bergman’s gloomiest, and most glorious, creation. Three sisters (Liv Ullman, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson) mope about a manor house as one (Andersson) lies on her deathbed, coming and going through dark corridors as they brood over the awful inevitability of dying, and the gossamer nature of faith. In 1972, B-movie king Roger Corman paid $75,000 for the film’s US rights, taking it all the way to the Oscars with five nominations including Best Picture. —RL

“The Damned” (1969)

Luchino Visconti’s decadent portrait of Weimar-era Germany through the eyes of a wealthy family in coalition with the Nazis was originally slapped with an X rating by the MPAA in the U.S.: acts of homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, and incest shocked censors at the time. Visconti’s lover Helmut Berger plays a twisted sexual deviant who uses his appetite for his own illicit gains. —RL

“Dogtooth” (2009)

Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee “Dogtooth” proved that cinematic weirdo and provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos was no fluke. And this remains one of his most provocative entries ever in examining with his trademark surgicial precision the tilted, twisted lives of a sheltered family of adult offspring who, ensconced on a chilly compound, have no understanding of the basic commands and functions of the world. —RL

“Fat Girl” (2001)

Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl” is regarded often for its wicked, out-of-the-blue ending that features a harrowing act of cruelty. But the story has plenty of shocks of its own in this tale of two sisters (Anaïs Pingot, Elena Pingot), one more conventionally beautiful by patriarchal standards than the other and at different levels of burgeoning sexuality whose toxic bond is as disturbing as any random act of cinematic violence. —RL

“Goodnight Mommy”

In the opening of “Goodnight Mommy,” the camera slithers through a cornfield in an isolated natural world suggestive of a fairy tale, before introducing Elias and Lukas (Elias and Lukas Schwarz), identical adolescent twins who look like the pin-up children of the Third Reich, who aren’t convinced that their chilly, (also) blonde mother (Susanne Wuest) is really who she says she is. While garden variety American horror movies aren’t prudish about turning children into harbingers of evil, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s “Goodnight Mommy” goes to even further, more horrifying lengths to propose that children could actually be inherently malevolent. —RL

“Hard to Be a God” (2013)

Late Russian director Aleksei German put one of the better arthouse twists on the sci-fi genre with a film that dared to ask, “What would you do in God’s place?” A group of research scientists is sent on a mission to a planet nearly identical to Earth, but where the inhabitants live in an oppressive society that invokes the Middle Ages. As scientists, the men are forbidden to interfere, but when Don Rumata (played by great Leonid Yarmolnik) is recognized as a futuristic god, he’s driven by a need to save a group of local intellectuals from a murderous tyrant.

German created a bleak world (even by Russian standards), but it’s also a wandering, visually rich, and cinematically exciting journey that takes advantage of sci-fi’s ability to ask some deep questions and deliver devastating political commentary. —Chris O’Falt

“High Tension’ (2003)

A French nail-biter divisive for a twist ending that might warm M. Night Shyamalan’s heart, “Haute Tension” put Alexandre Aja on the horror movie map, though he never surpassed this disturbing 2003 movie that’s also a radical, feminist love story. While the film features enough gut-twisting violence to fill several movies, it’s the leading performance from Cécile de France that makes the sickening horrors on display (involving mutilation and decapitation, among many other things) easier to digest. —RL

“I Saw the Devil” (2010)

Korean director Kim Jee-woon is the real deal. He’s a smart, visually canny director with a sharp sense of humor who adeptly plays with genres, from his sixth film, the wacky Western-movie hit “The Good, The Bad, and the Weird” to the serial killer thriller “I Saw the Devil,” which features his go-to star Lee Byung-hun. This time, Lee plays a homicide detective on the hunt for an insane serial killer who wacked his pregnant wife in a haunting opening sequence. This movie is not for the squeamish — Kim takes the violence about as far as anyone ever has — but he’s working out ideas, with irony. This vengeance plot, with all its gore and evil, is in the service of art. And the Hitchcockian film pulls the viewer into the killer’s mind, Ripley-style. Kim’s relentless camera tracks the deliciously horrible madman’s moves as he ingeniously battles his doggedly clever assailant. As Kim put it, “it’s about the dilemma of a man who must become the devil to defeat the devil.” In Korea, for the first time the film was restricted twice for violent content, yet despite the difficulties filmgoers faced to see it, the film became a monster hit. —Anne Thompson

“In My Skin” (2002)

“In My Skin” is one of many films to come out of the New French Extremity movement, which included filmmakers like Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux, and Gaspar Noe. This one’s about a woman who becomes increasingly obsessed with mutilating her own body after an intense accident at a dinner party that she barely felt. Her fascination with her wounds takes her to dark places that make this film a deeply uncomfortable watch. —RL

“Inside” (2007)

The best pregnancy thriller since “Rosemary’s Baby” is also, frankly, one of the most unnerving slasher movies ever made. French directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury (whose comparatively understated gothic followup “Livid” is totally different) held nothing back for this tale of a pregnant woman fending off a home invader who wants the child in her womb. Never released in American theaters, “Inside” contains some seriously demented imagery, but not before setting up the scares with a technical efficiency that’s downright Hitchcockian. For the most part, “Inside” revolves around the efforts of expectant single mother Sarah (Alysson Paradis) to prevent an intruder from literally ripping a child from her abdomen. Knives and scissors fly freely, but the elegant camerawork makes it clear that the filmmakers aren’t aiming for pure shock value. Instead, “Inside” is a classic home invasion story with the suspense turned up to 11 and the bloody punchlines turned up to 12. Watch it once and every slasher movie you see afterwards will have to work a little harder to prove its worth. —Eric Kohn

“Irreversible’ (2002)

“Irreversible” is another French film now so iconic in the canon of horrifying, can’t-watch-it-twice psychological horror movies that viewers often overlook how beautiful it is. Though this backwards-flowing film starts with acts of brutality (rendered impressively by Gaspar Noe) and then an awful rape scene (one that, if you do watch this one again, you’re likely to just skip over), it culminates in a quite stunning moment of love, and a spiraling upward toward the cosmos that recalls the most breathtaking moments of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (There’s a reason that movie’s poster is on the walls of the apartment shared by Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel.) —RL

“Man Bites Dog” (1992)

Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde’s darkly comic rockumentary follows a serial killer (Benoît Poelvoorde) — witty, charming, well-liked, and even well-read and culturally rarified — who allows his horrifying crimes to be captured by the crew. The “filmmakers” become implicated in the increasingly nihilistic violence that unfolds without any humanity, and curdles from black comedy to deeply disturbing. Entrails and gaping wounds abound. The film originally received an NC-17 rating in the U.S. —RL

“Woman in the Dunes” (1964)

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Academy Award-nominated psychosexual fable centers on an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) studying a novel beetle in a vast desert whose landscape is as much a terrifying presence as any horror movie villain. After he misses a bus back to Tokyo, the entomologist spends the night with a widow who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand pit, endlessly digging for eternity. The widow traps him in her lair, leading to a disturbing battle of the sexes that features less all-out psycho-horror movie thrills than a pervasive atmosphere of dread as the entomologist tries to escape — to elliptical results. —RL

“Martyrs” (2008)

Pascal Laugier’s skin-crawling (and in some cases, here, flaying and flogging) extreme French horror entry takes many twists and turns, but ultimately pivots on a secret society that believes its victims can transcend torture to become martyrs and learn secrets of the afterlife. Extended sequences of torture and self-harm make this a sickening sit, but its ideas, and what’s left unsaid about life after death (especially in the final moments) continue to haunt. —RL

“Raw” (2016)

One of the most shocking debuts in recent years, director Julia Ducournau’s wild first feature follows a young student (Garance Marillier) who discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself (and the world) when she heads off to vet school (kind of the perfect setting for a body horror film). Marillier’s Justine is a dedicated vegetarian, so when she’s forced to endure a revolting hazing ritual (one that involves lots of blood and raw liver), she’s shocked to discover just how much she endures the taste of flesh. As Justine’s hunger for consuming meat grows, so does her desire to experience the pleasures of the flesh in different ways. Suffice to say, “Raw” is a visceral, challenging and often just plain jaw-dropping feature. —Kate Erbland

“Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom”

The mother of them all, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s damning critique of fascism at its worst extremes has not lost any of its ability to shock and disturb five decades later. A loose adaptation of the Marquis de Sade but reset in World War II, “Salo” is about an elite pack of libertines who kidnap teenagers and subject them to the worst tortures imaginable. Pasolini doesn’t flinch at any of them in his angry final film. —RL

“The Seventh Continent” (1989)

You couldn’t go wrong with picking almost any Michael Haneke effort as one of the most disturbing non-English language films ever made, but we’re going with “The Seventh Continent” as the one that sticks in your gut — Haneke depicts a family that, with no apparent reason, decides to slowly off itself in a slow-motion suicide. But not without ridding itself of the furnishings of capitalism and wordly pleasures, first. —RL

“Sombre” (1998)

Philippe Grandrieux’s bold experimental statement unfolds entirely through the eyes of a serial murderer who preys upon women while following along the Tour de France. Grandrieux evokes, through shadows and a camera so shaking and disoriented that it’s disturbing enough on its own terms, the nape-prickling experience of being watched, and then devoured. —RL

“Trouble Every Day” (2002)

Connecting sex and violence in a vampire movie is hardly new terrain, but through the lens of director Claire Denis — and the way her camera studies bodies in motion — it becomes a natural extension of her quieter dramas and a somber look at man’s nature. Normally Paris is the perfect romantic city for a honeymoon, but our groom, an American scientist (Vincent Gallo), is there to search for his ex-lover Coré (Béatrice Dalle), with whom he shares a desire for blood when aroused. Coré has become an “Under the Skin”–like seductress, luring men to hidden locations with the promise of sex, before ripping them to shreds. Eventually, Coré’s keeper Léo (Alex Descas) — another scientist of sorts — tracks her down, buries the bodies, and locks her back up in his basement laboratory. It’s a pattern that defines their relationship. “Trouble Every Day” was somewhat panned following its Cannes premiere, but has been reexamined quite a bit over the years as Denis’ work looks more intentional and layered with each passing year. —Chris O’Falt

“Visitor Q” (2001)

This list wouldn’t be complete without one more Miike addition. Shot on digital video for almost nothing, Takashi Miike’s “Visitor Q” reinvented the premise behind Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema” (where an alluring stranger disrupts the lives of a middle-class household) to fit his own perverse mold. Necrophilia, sexual violence, and substance abuse abound in this pageant of torture that, despite its many surface terrors, has a blackly humorous streak in its depiction of a family seeking redemption. —RL