Dead Duck Film Club

"Funny Games" And the Violence You Asked For

Funny Games (1997), directed by Michael Haneke, is an Austrian home invasion film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Comparisons made to Speak No Evil (original Danish) and The Coffee Table. Films mentioned: Benny's Video, The Piano Teacher, Creep, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Hostel, Kill Bill. Warm-up: Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), Suspiria (2018 remake, Dakota Johnson), Shin Godzilla, and Kristen Stewart's Chronology of Water.

"Audition" And The Loneliness Epidemic Made Flesh

Audition (1999), directed by Takashi Miike, is a Japanese horror film based on Ryu Murakami's 1997 novel of the same name. Released the same year as Ring, it holds 81% from critics and 80% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The film caused walkouts and audience illness at its original festival screenings in Dublin and the US. Eihi Shiina plays Asami, a role she and Miike partly developed through improvisation during production, including the film's most iconic scene. Seb, Bruna, and George discuss the film's two-phase structure, the audition scene as a lens on male fantasy vs the reality of women, why a film from 1999 still maps onto the male loneliness epidemic and trad wife discourse, Asami's white costuming as a death symbol in Japanese culture, the ambiguity of the dream and flashback sequences. Films mentioned include Memories of Murder, Body Double, The Coffee Table, Ichi the Killer, The Handmaiden, Kill Bill, Possession, Censor, and Nora. Spoilers throughout.

"A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" The First Iranian Vampire Western

This week Seb and Mark are in Bad City, talking about Ana Lily Amirpour's 2014 debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The Iranian vampire western. They dig into what makes this film so unlike anything else in the genre, from its punk iconography rooted in a chador and a skateboard, to its black and white California-shot vision of a fictional Iran packed with all the things you would never expect from an Iranian film. Prostitutes, queer characters, nightclubs, a vampire on a skateboard. The whole lot.

"Akira" And How It Changed An Entire Industry

Akira (1988), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Japan. Based on Otomo's six-volume manga series. One of the most widely referenced animated films of all time, credited with opening the Western market to Japanese animation. Its 1989 US release led to the formation of a dedicated anime distribution company for the West. Sebastien and Markc cover the plot's structural limitations (six volumes condensed into one film, large cast, multiple unresolved threads), the film's political content around youth and power, the animation's technical standard relative to its 1988 contemporaries including early Simpsons and Looney Tunes, and why those story issues don't affect his overall verdict.

"The Stranger" And The Game We Call Life

Seb and Mark dig into The Stranger (2026), François Ozon's new adaptation of Albert Camus' L'Étranger (1942), a book long considered unadaptable, which Visconti already tried to film in 1967. Starring Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, Rebecca Marder as Marie Cardona, Denis Lavant as Salamano, and Pierre Lottin as Raymond. Set in 1930s French-colonial Algeria, the film follows an indifferent Frenchman whose life is reshaped by his mother's funeral and a senseless act of violence on a beach. The conversation covers Ozon's decision to strip out the book's first-person narration, Benjamin Voisin's performance, the film's real argument against capital punishment, how race and colonialism enter the courtroom, and why The Stranger and A Clockwork Orange are asking the same question from opposite ends. Spoilers flagged. Sidebar watches: Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama, Coherence (2013), and Seb's first time with A Clockwork Orange. They close by watching Ozon's six-minute student short Photo de Famille (1988) together, his brother murders the family for a photo. Recommendations: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, Ozon's By the Grace of God, and French picks Polisse (2011) and In Safe Hands (2018).