While Hollywood celebrates its big-name directors and their expansive filmographies, the last few years have seen a boom in young auteurs telling their stories in innovative ways. The horror genre in particular has been reinvigorated with ambitious and intelligent storytelling thanks to talent like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, two of the best horror directors of the 2010s Thanks to studios like A24 and Blumhouse Productions, independent filmmakers have outlets outside of the traditional studio system to create original stories in an age of remakes, reboots, and massive comic book franchises.
These directors come from all corners of the globe, representing different backgrounds and point-of-views, each with a story to tell. Those included have made three feature-length films or less, but have already left an indelible mark on modern cinema.
Greta Gerwig
Hollywood has rightfully come under fire for its lack of both female-driven stories and women directors. Thus, Greta Gerwig's films are a breath of fresh air. Gerwig's debut Lady Bird and adaptation of Little Women gives audiences two different portraits of women coming of age, with over 100 years separating the two film's periods.
What connects both films is the director's comfortability with silence, allowing her characters to communicate their emotions through facial responses and body language. The airport scene at the end of Lady Bird is especially poignant, as Laurie Metcalf's character drives away from the airport where she has just dropped off her daughter who is off to college. As she navigates through the airport waypoints, she experiences a range of emotions, from arrogance to desperation, with only her facial expression giving the viewers cues. In just two films, Gerwig has proven herself a master of subtle character development.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter” captures the essence of motherhood in its messy, complicated glory. A mother herself, the actor-turned-director says the chance to capture the so often unspoken dimensions of that experience drew her to the novella by Italian author Elena Ferrante that she adapted herself.
In the film, a scholar with a promising academic career and a passionate love affair struggles with the guilt of prioritizing those things above her two children. Gyllenhaal can relate, to the extent that making the movie meant balancing the personal and professional sides of her own life.
Prior to “The Lost Daughter,” Gyllenhaal had helmed only one project, a short film for the 2020 anthology series “Homemade.” But with extensive experience as an actor — including an Oscar nomination for “Crazy Heart” — she gleaned lessons learned from the directors with whom she’d worked in front of the camera.
“I’ve worked with directors who were brutal, and I’ve also worked with directors who were actually interested in me and loving. And what I learned is that a big part of being a director is loving [the actors], really loving them. And seeing them. Completely.”
- Maggie Gyllenhaal, Variety
Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent exploded onto the arthouse-horror scene in 2014 with her debut picture The Babadook. The critically-acclaimed film tells the horrifying story of one mother's resentment for her child after the death of her husband and the pair's struggle to weather the sudden presence of a monster manifested out of the mother's resentment.
The film is gorgeous, haunting, and immensely meaningful, and its success propelled Kent into the film industry. The director released her second film, The Nightingale, in 2018 to similar success and acclaim.
Theo Anthony
“All Light Everywhere,” directed by Anthony, winds its way through fragmentary observations about modern surveillance society, unearthing a wide range of amorphous connections about its subject. However, Theo Anthony’s ambitious documentary unearths one brilliant connection — a fascinating lineage between the camera and the gun — and roots it in historical fact.
For that reason alone, the filmmaker’s strange and alluring rumination on the ways technology exerts control over human life is a worthy follow-up to his 2016 debut “Rat Film,” which used Baltimore’s rodent infestation as a savvy metaphor for gentrification.
All Light Everywhere investigates how little we see about the way the world looks back at us, careening from a warehouse that develops tasers and police body cameras, to training sessions for officers who wear the devices, the machinations of a spy plane entrepreneur, and the history of camera pigeons in WWI.
In the most compelling passages, Anthony journeys back to the late 19th century, unearthing the little-known history of astrophotography and mug shots, finding a remarkable set of connections between camera technology and weapons of war. All of that comes full circle in a climactic confrontation about the nature of privacy in a world governed by corporate power, as the film coheres into a compelling riff on the ominous forces governing everyday life that’s both alarming and awe-inspiring at once.
Jin Huaqing
Every year, thousands of Tibetan nuns of the Yarchen Monastery head to rickey wooden homes set against the yawning backdrop of the Tibetan plateau, where they engage in deep meditation and personal inquiry. It’s not the most comfortable retreat: Taking place during the 100 coldest days of the year, the gathering forces its participants to undergo a dramatic physical endurance test as they engage in profound questions about the world around them.
In Dark Red Forest, Director Jin Huaqing stays close to this journey with a mesmerizing visual tone poem that captures both the vast emptiness of a world loaded with cosmic significance and the intimacy of the soul-searcher figures at its center. If there was ever a movie well-positioned for the first big-screen festival to return to New York City, this is it.
Both cinematically dazzling and profound in its quest to understand the mysteries of the universe, Dark Red Forest transports its audiences to the same frigid landscape that brings its nuns to a higher plane of consciousness.
Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers is a director with a distinct style. His films, which sit on the fringe of the psychological horror genre, are extremely bleak. Eggers has a strong eye for detail and uses that eye to create meticulous period-accurate sets that serve as immersive backdrops to his films. Eggers has two films to his name, 2015's The Witch, and 2019's The Lighthouse. Both are incredibly dark and atmospheric, and both excel at drawing terror and tension out of their well-developed characters.
The Lighthouse, which stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two adversarial lighthouse keepers stranded with each other on a tiny island, is an experiential film that relies heavily on its stunning cinematography and sound design to engage and enthrall.
Nia DaCosta
When creating a sequel to the original 1995 horror film, Candyman, director Nia DaCosta made a bold decision to change the identity of the film's central phantasm from a man with a fishhook hand to unprocessed trauma. The daring risk worked, and DaCosta made a horror movie whose villains are gentrification, racism, and police brutality.
DaCosta also course-corrected the original film's biggest mistake by making the central character of her adaptation Black and born of Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing projects, where the history of Candyman originated from. As the viewer watches protagonist Anthony McCoy delve deeper into Candyman lore, he finds more than he bargained for. Once the curse is set, and Candyman has a new victim, DaCosta shows what happens when 300 years of unprocessed trauma comes boiling to the surface.
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