Under the Skin (2014)
If you appreciate the cold, observational, and profoundly alien perspective of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi masterpiece is essential viewing. Following an extraterrestrial entity (Scarlett Johansson) as she drives a van around Scotland,
the film strips humanity down to its most basic, confusing elements. Like Kubrick, Glazer trusts the audience to interpret events without a guiding narrative hand. Much of the film uses hidden cameras, capturing Johansson’s interactions with real, non-actor locals, creating a disquieting blend of fiction and documentary. The visuals are abstract and hypnotic, particularly in the stark, black-liquid sequences that recall the star-gate journey. It’s a film about seeing our world through a lens of complete otherness, a theme Kubrick explored his entire career.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a career of exploring the unsettling and absurd, and this film might be his most Kubrickian effort. A successful surgeon’s life unravels after he takes a strange teenager under his wing, leading to an impossible moral choice rooted in Greek tragedy. The visual style is pure Kubrick: symmetrical framing, unnervingly wide-angle tracking shots down long hospital corridors, and a sense of architectural dread. The performances are deliberately stilted and emotionally flat, creating a pervasive unease that recalls the detached horror of The Shining. With its pitch-black humor, nihilistic tone, and meticulous, controlled direction, the film feels like an artifact from a parallel universe where Kubrick was still making deeply challenging and divisive art.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the few modern directors often seen as an heir to Kubrick, and this epic tale of greed, faith, and oil is his grandest statement. From its dialogue-free opening sequence, which echoes the dawn-of-man prologue in 2001, the film announces its monumental ambition. It’s a character study of a man’s descent into misanthropic madness, anchored by a towering performance from Daniel Day-Lewis. Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit crafted a look that is both naturalistic and starkly beautiful, using vintage lenses and, in some scenes, only the light from real fires to illuminate the action. The film’s themes of obsession, corruption, and the violent birth of American industry are explored with a detached, almost surgical precision that Kubrick himself would have admired.
Enemy (2013)
For fans of Kubrick's more enigmatic, puzzle-box films like Eyes Wide Shut, Denis Villeneuve's Enemy offers a deeply satisfying and confounding experience. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a dreary history professor who discovers his exact double, an impulsive actor, leading him down a rabbit hole of paranoia and fractured identity. The film is drenched in a sickly, yellow-brown filter, creating a perpetually oppressive atmosphere. Villeneuve fills the frame with recurring, nightmarish spider symbolism that defies easy explanation, demanding interpretation from the viewer. It’s a psychological thriller that’s less concerned with plot mechanics and more with exploring themes of control, identity, and subconscious desire through a disorienting, dream-like logic. The chilling final shot is one of the most debated and unforgettable in recent memory.
Hereditary (2018)
Ari Aster’s devastating debut feature does for domestic horror what The Shining did for the haunted house movie: it elevates the genre to high art. The comparisons are numerous and earned. Both films are slow-burns that meticulously build an atmosphere of unbearable dread within a single family. Aster employs a similarly precise and controlled visual style, using slow dolly moves, wide angles, and miniatures that function much like the Overlook Hotel's maze, representing a sinister, inescapable design. The central performance by Toni Collette, portraying a mother’s unraveling grief and terror, is as committed and unhinged as Jack Nicholson's in The Shining. It’s a film that takes its horror seriously, grounding supernatural events in profound psychological and familial trauma.
