Let’s be honest…2025 wasn’t a flawless year for film. There were misfires, messes, and more than a few releases that tested everyone’s patience. But, it was never boring. 2025 was the year cinema went feral and chose chaos; I loved its audacity.

These films cut through the noise and actually gave us something worth shouting about.

10. Bring Her Back

What’s it about? Following the death of their father, a brother and sister are sent to live with a foster mother, only to learn that she is hiding a terrifying secret.

Why you should watch it: Now this film is a good example of how horror is driven by obsession and desperation – where grief mutates into something reckless and dangerous, and every decision feels like it’s being made one breath too late. Sally Hawkins is the film’s beating, unhinged heart. It’s suffocating and it’s tense; everything you’d expect from an A24 horror.

9. Sinners

What’s it about? Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.

Why you should watch it: Sinners is feral, messy and gloriously unhinged. It sure as hell flirts with chaos; it’s rooted in discomfort and uses this as its best feature, rather than a flaw. You won’t feel like you’ve watched a film, it’s an experience you survived.

8. The Ballad of Wallis Island

What’s it about? An eccentric lottery winner who lives alone on a remote island tries to make his fantasies come true by getting his favourite musicians to perform at his home.

Why you should watch it: The film examines how loneliness can be both a shelter and heartache. It never mocks or romanticises the characters for their isolation – the performances carry a soft, lived-in warmth that makes every interaction feel earned and fragile. It’s a little sad, and quietly unforgettable.

7. I Swear

What’s it about? Inspired by the life of John Davidson, charting his journey from a misunderstood teenager in 1980’s Britain to a present day advocate for the understanding and acceptance of Tourettes Syndrome. Diagnosed aged fifteen, John navigates his way against the odds through troubled teenage years and into adulthood, finding inspiration in the kindness of others to discover his true purpose in life.

Why you should watch it: I Swear addresses Tourette’s not as a hook or a ‘lesson’, but as a lived, relentless presence that shapes how the world listens, or refuses to. It’s aware of how exhausting it is to be misunderstood in public and overinterpreted in private, and it lets that tension drive its emotional core. It’s about being seen as you are, and loved without translation.

6. Eternity

What’s it about? In an afterlife where souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity, Joan is faced with the impossible choice between the man she spent her life with and her first love, who died young and has waited decades for her to arrive.

Why you should watch it: Eternity is like a conversation you weren’t ready to have, the kind that sneaks up on you and leaves you a little undone. Its concept does the heavy-lifting; it’s thought-provoking and daring, but it’s also imperfect and stubborn.

5. The Ugly Stepsister

What’s it about? In a fairy-tale kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira battles to compete with her incredibly beautiful stepsister, and she will go to any length to catch the prince’s eye.

Why you should watch it: The Ugly Stepsister takes a familiar fairy tale and drags it somewhere rawer, meaner, and far more human, reframing cruelty in entirely different form. It pulses with resentment, shame, and hunger…for beauty, for love, and for permission to exist without apology. It refuses to soften those feelings for its audience; it’s a dark reimagining that will stay with you.

4. Sound of Falling

What’s it about? Four adolescent girls each spend their youth in the same farmhouse over the last century. Though separated by decades, resonances between their lives emerge: their desires and distress, secrets and truths, encounters with another’s gaze and defiant gaze in return.

Why you should watch it: A truly devastating film where grief doesn’t announce itself; it accumulates, settles, and reshapes the air its characters breathe. It doesn’t treat loss as an event, but as a presence, something that echoes through rooms, relationships, and time itself. And it does so with an almost unbearable intimacy.

3. Weapons

What’s it about? When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.

Why you should watch it: Weapons operates less like a conventional run-of-the-mill horror film and more like a wound being pressed from multiple angles, daring you to flinch first. It’s provactive in all the right ways and sinks its teeth into the unbearable question of what happens after the unthinkable.

2. Sentimental Value

What’s it about? Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star.

Why you should watch it: The film deeply understands that sentimentality can be a form of control. And that in itself is an interesting angle. It moves with a quiet fury, letting resentment, longing, and unspoken grief stack up until they become undeniable. The performances by Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgard lean into that pressure rather than defusing it. It’s stripped back and quietly devastating, carrying an ache that lingers long after it speaks.

1. Hamnet

What’s it about? The powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.

Why you should watch it: It resists the obvious temptation to cosplay as your average ‘Shakespearean film’, and instead commits to something bolder. It’s a film that trusts the audience to sit with discomfort and ambiguity, and what makes Hamnet so sharp is its restraint. It never begs for your tears; it earns them.