Hello everyone, sorry to have been away so long. 2022 featured various new challenges and opportunities, some of which led to new outlets for my critical ideas. This includes various websites where my views can be, well, viewed, as well as my ongoing podcast Invasion of the Pody People and appearances on multiple other podcasts. But after all this time, I felt I should come back and offer my view here on Vincent’s Views. And what better way to return than by casting my eye over the films of 2022?
In brief, 2022 was a really strong year for film. It’s a sign of great cinema that, when you decide to whittle down what you saw to a best of list, it is initially very difficult to decide what gets into that list – top twelve for my own musical reasons – and then equally difficult to decide how you would rank them. Indeed, the process of deciding my top twelve involved a great deal of going back and forth. Was I more moved by The Velvet Queen or Belfast? Does the atmosphere of The Batman trump the exhilaration of Top Gun: Maverick? Do the chills of The Innocents surpass those of Speak No Evil? Was Benedetta or She Said ultimately more impressive? These are the questions that occupied my mind throughout the latter weeks of December, once I had seen everything that I thought might break into the top twelve.
Horror was especially strong in 2022, as identified by other critics and in terms of what I saw, since I attended FrightFest both in Glasgow and London. Some of the highlights of this wonderful festival included You Are Not My Mother, Some Like It Rare and Monstrous in March, while August offered such delights as Lola, Huesera: The Bone Woman, Swallowed, Fall and one of the most popular horrors of the year, Barbarian. Other great horror included X, The Feast, Piggy, Halloween Ends, They Live in the Grey, Smile, Nope, The Black Phone, Men, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, and some especially strong offerings from Scandinavia, which provided Hatching from Finland, the Danish/Dutch Speak No Evil and The Innocents from Norway. Other commentators have described 2022 as an exceptional year for horror, and looking at the evidence I have no argument with that claim.
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