Number 5's Surreal Creepy Film Collection

[Rev. Rye]

I’d nominate most anything by Peter Greenaway.

Highlights of his oeuvre include:

• The Falls, a 3-hour encyclopedia of 92 people affected by something called the Violent Unknown Event, and a film I’m almost certain would never have been made by anyone who didn’t have autism. Naturally, I love it. 
  
• The Draughtsman’s Contract, easily the sanest of his works that I’ve seen, and it still has things like a man who pretends to be a statue and eavesdrops on the characters for some reason. 
  
• A Zed and Two Naughts, about twin zoologists who become obsessed with time-lapse films of decomposition after their wives die in a car crash, plus amputations.
  
• The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, probably the most straightforwardly-plotted of his films, but no less bizarre, and extremely disturbing. 
  
• Prospero’s Books, an adaptation of The Tempest where John Gielgud plays Prospero, who does every voice in the film, and gets full frontal (also, did I mention Gielgud was in his mid-80s at this point)?
  
• The Baby of Macon, a mix of the most horrific parts of mother!, religious allegory, and that one time I went to see Edward II at Chicago Shakespeare and the audience had to walk around the set. It was banned in America for a bit over a quarter century before it finally got a VOD release last year.
  
• There’s more, but A lot of it’s hard to find, especially the post-Macon films, but Amazon Prime has a documentary about him called The Greenaway Alphabet, which might help explain why his films are the way they are, and will likely erase any doubts that he’s on the autism spectrum.
  

Here’s a clip of one of his most famous sequences:

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