Top six underrated films of December 2022, from a difficult-to-watch abortion drama to an Oscar frontrunner

You can check out our lists of top films from January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October and November by clicking on them.

But the culture of watching great films has declined so rapidly in India (and in most countries outside Europe, really) that it is entirely possible for future generations to not have heard the name Inarritu at all. Even a couple of decades ago, revival houses in Delhi and Mumbai would screen classics to packed houses. Nobody expected these movies to generate the crores that is considered a mark of success in our money-minded society. Forget getting a chance to watch the films of Andrei Tarkovsky on the big screen; anything below a certain budget bracket these days struggles to find reasonable exhibition.

That being said, here are five films that deserve your attention ahead of the 2023 awards season, where several (if not all) of them will be in consideration.

Happening – Available to stream on AMC+ in the United States

The title card for Happening.

Horrific but not entirely without hope, director Audrey Diwan’s wrenching abortion drama straps you to the growing belly of a French student in the 1960s, and leaves you to hang on for dear life as she careens from one doctor to the next, looking for aid. Played by a startling Anamaria Vartolomei, the protagonist Anne is put through the ringer by a system designed to oppress and punish people like her.

The tone is consistently unsettling, and Diwan’s tight 4:3 framing only heightens the sense of dread. Nobody should be made to go through what Anne experiences in this film, and the feeling of outrage that Happening leaves you with is difficult to escape. If anything, there was an opportunity here to be more provocative, but that would’ve sent the film firmly into the realm of cruelty.

Holy Spider – Available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, YouTube and Amazon in France

The title card for Holy Spider.

Director Ali Abbasi combines his love for genre cinema with potent, urgent themes in his latest film, Holy Spider — a crime drama that blends elements of horror and satire, as it dramatises a spree of serial killings that rocked Iran some years ago. Alternatively grim and darkly humorous, the perspective that Abbasi chooses to adopt in the film might be too bitter a pill to swallow for some viewers, but his allegiance never deviates from his feisty protagonist, a journalist investigating the killings independently.

As David Fincher once said about the movies of Stanley Kubrick, there is an assumption that the viewer’s moral compass will guide them through some of the more contentious corners of stories such as this, as opposed to the story itself telling viewers what to feel about it.

The Quiet Girl – Available to rent and purchase on Amazon, Google, Apple TV in the United Kingdom

The title card for The Quiet Girl.

On the face of it, the Irish language drama The Quiet Girl could come across as a saccharine children’s story, but like its unassuming protagonist — a nine-year-old girl sent to live with distant relatives because her impoverished family can’t afford to keep her — there is more to the film than meets the eye.

Quietly devastating and difficult to move on from even days later, The Quiet Girl uses simple storytelling techniques, evocative cinematography, and above all, the expressive faces of its fine cast to tell a grand story about kindness and hope.

Navalny – On HBO Max in the United States

The title card for Navalny.

A sensational piece of entertainment, director Daniel Roher’s documentary traces the immediate aftermath of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, possibly at the hands of president Vladimir Putin. At least that’s what the movie implies, using ‘evidence’ that it extracts in one of the most euphoric scenes in all of cinema this year.

Navalny himself makes for an engaging subject — an opportunist who bit off more than he could chew, and is now so completely committed to his cause that he is clearly willing to die for it. But this is an admittedly cynical way of looking at things, because even the most cold-hearted viewer will be moved in the film’s final moments.

She Said – Available to rent and purchase on Apple, Google, YouTube, Amazon in the United States

The title card for She Said.

The third overtly feminist film on this list, the American drama She Said is about an issue that could theoretically be relatable for women across the world. Based on the New York Times’ investigation of disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein’s many misdeeds, director Maria Schrader’s movie underplays the drama, avoids outbursts, and takes a generally respectful tone in telling a story that wasn’t entirely victimless.

It helps that both Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan understood the assignment, and used the script’s constraints to their advantage. It should, however, be noted that the film is co-produced by Brad Pitt, who was accused of physical violence in the weeks leading up to its release.

The Fabelmans – Available to rent and purchase on Apple, Google, YouTube, Amazon in the United States

The title card of The Fabelmans.

It feels sacrilegious to say this, but this year has produced a Steven Spielberg movie that people have simply not paid any attention to. And this isn’t a West Side Story situation either. The Fabelmans — inspired by the filmmaker’s own troubled youth — might be one of the best movies that he has ever made, and this is saying something.

Utterly impossible to shake off, and moving in more ways than can be absorbed in one viewing, the film is ostensibly about the emotional trauma that the disintegration of his family caused him — this is a theme that Spielberg has found himself returning to several times over the years. But The Fabelmans can also be read as a paean to art and artists, a veiled gay allegory, and an incisively self-critical piece about the insecurities of someone who has remained at the peak of their chosen field for half-a-century.