20 recommended films from the 2025 Sitges Film Festival

BarcelonaIf the Sitges Festival were a monster it would undoubtedly be one kaiju, a behemoth of unattainable size that will host nearly 400 screenings of fantasy, horror, and other genres from October 10th to 19th. The Matadero Cultural Center will once again fill the gap left by the Cine Retiro, which was closed for renovations, in an edition marked by visits from Benedict Cumberbatch, Terry Gilliam, and Joe Dante, among others.

A key director of modern horror, Mike Flanagan had already adapted Stephen King before, but not a story as playful and experimental as that of Chuck's Life, a bittersweet reflection on the transience of life and destiny told in reverse chronological order and, surely, the best King adaptation to film of the last decade. As if Charlie Kaufman had directed How wonderful it is to live.

The directors' marriage formed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani takes his deconstruction of genres to the extreme in this almost abstract retelling of European spy films, so packed with visual and audio ideas that it tests the viewer's ability to process them. This Sitges experience also features one of the best action scenes of the year.

Benedict Cumberbatch will not only receive the Time Machine Award for roles such as Sherlock and Dr. Strange, but will also present this oppressive psychological drama about a comic book artist devastated by the death of his wife. When a menacing presence appears in the house where he lives with his two children, grief takes the form of an anthropomorphic crow, and fiction blurs with reality.

The collapsing ceiling in a therapist's apartment serves as an almost literal metaphor for the emotional crisis of a mother overwhelmed by problems: too much wine and weed, a daughter who must be fed through a tube, her husband absent for two months at work... Rose Byrne, extremely dedicated – and awarded for beauty – and awarded for motherhood with juicy supporting roles by Conan O'Brien and ASAP Rocky.

Modern and perverse reinterpretation of the tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen in which Marion Cotillard She is a cold and cruel diva who establishes a strange relationship with the orphan girl who has taken refuge in the studio where a film is being shot. Lucile Hadzihalilovic films the story with a disturbing aesthetic precision, but generally more accessible than in Evolution either Earwig.

One of the most anticipated films of this edition is the new thriller by Korean Park Chan-wook, who, after a sublime filigree like Decision to leave –second best film of 2023 for ARA critics–, adapts a crime novel by Donald E. Westlake about the desperate search for work of a man played by Lee Byung-hun, the actor who played the leader in The Squid Game.

After the explosion of Titane, 2021 Palme d'Or at Cannes, Julia Ducournau reaffirms his obsession with the body horror and the mutations in a three-way family drama (a teenager, the nurse mother and the wayward uncle) that works as an allegory of the fear of AIDS that was experienced during the epidemic of the 80s and 90s. Expressive and grotesque like Terry Gilliam's darkest stories.

The fourth collaboration between Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos adapts a Korean film that in 2003 thrilled the audience at the Sitges Festival, Save the green planet! To his delirious story of two young outcasts who kidnap a businessman because they believe he's an alien invader, Lanthimos adds brutal violence and a political interpretation of the current political landscape.

"Frankenstein is a geek who doesn't fit in... Frankenstein is me," Guillermo del Toro confessed to the ARA in 2015. Ten years later, the Mexican director signs one remake from his most beloved film. Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi plays the creature in a new version of the Promethean myth that claims the right to be different and attacks major institutions and social norms.

The Sitges audience has seen a few supernatural horror films about a house inhabited by evil spirits. But not ones starring a dog, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever with an intense gaze that's the only thing that perceives the paranormal phenomena that threaten its owner. With a runtime of just 72 minutes, it's one of the most original horror films of the year.

Dave Franco and Alison Brie, a married couple in real life, are a couple that is not having the best of times in this romantic comedy in key body horror In which a supernatural phenomenon draws them together, with unexpected—and painful—physiological consequences. Sitges audiences will enjoy this brutal metaphor about the limits of intimacy in relationships.

Yeah Chuck's Life adapts one of Stephen King's most recent stories, The long march brings to the cinema the first novel he wrote (eight years before debuting with Carrie). Completely current, it is set in a dystopian United States governed by an authoritarian regime in which a hundred young people must walk day and night and, one by one, are executed by soldiers if they slow down three times.

As Eulàlia Iglesias said in his chronicle from the Locarno Festival, Radu Jude "pushes a deconstruction of the commercial appropriations (vampirizations?) of Dracula" in this first Romanian version of the myth of Dracula, which coexists in the Sitges program with a much more conventional adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel directed by Frenchman Luc Besson.

With Black phone, Scott Derrickson reconnected with pure horror after his frustrating experience at Marvel. Now, the director of Sinister continues the story of the serial killer who hides Ethan Hawke's face behind a demonic mask and the boy who confronts him thanks to the advice of his previous victims. A classic horror based on a story by Joe Hill, son of the master Stephen King.

The first film adaptation of the work of Mariana Enriquez which comes after her breakthrough as a queen of modern horror – there was already one from 2002, Going down is the pitjor– interweaves two stories of The dangers of smoking on the leg (Anagrama, 2002) to give shape to a teenage drama set in the Argentine crisis of 2001 that gradually moves towards the territory of the fantastic and horror.

What would Sitges be without a zombie movie for the Zombie Walk night? This year's is also one of the most acclaimed horror films of the season, starring Daisy Ridley – the Rey from the latest trilogy of Star Wars– as a volunteer who buries the victims of a failed military experiment in the hope of finding her husband alive. Needless to say, the dead soon begin to show disturbing signs of life.

An old acquaintance of the Sitges Festival –and Grand Prix Honoree in 2021–, the Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda is one of the giants of modern animation. Scarlet, in which Hosoda's drawing style evolves towards more European textures, is his personal version of Hamlet, a fantasy adventure in which a medieval princess embarks on a quest to avenge her father's death.

Without seeing it, we are convinced that one of the surprises of this edition will be Flush, in which a cocaine addict who has swallowed a bunch of packets of drugs finds himself trapped in shit, but literally: he has his head stuck in the toilet hole of the club where his former love works. Between black comedy and thriller frenetic of a single stage, it seems like a bastard son of Buried and Trainspotting.

Ben Wheatley, director we discovered in Sitges in 2011 with the very dark Kill list, will receive this year's Time Machine Award and will present Bulk, a return to thriller low-budget paranoid after trying his luck in the blockbuster of giant sharks with Megalodon 2: The PitAnd to shut everyone up, he does it with his most unusual, experimental, and Lynchian film.

Awarded Best Film of the Cannes Critics' Week, in Thailand A useful ghost There's no room for the ridiculous. In this fantastic comedy with a romantic pamphlet twist, a woman dies from pollution and is reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner, a transformation that doesn't change—in fact, intensifies—the love she feels for her husband.