This year I watched forty Australian films and the best ones made me nervous

I kept a list this year. I do not always keep a list, but in January I started writing down every Australian film I watched, the date, a one-sentence reaction, and a gut score out of ten. By December the list had forty-three entries, and when I looked back through them I noticed something I had not noticed while I was living through the year: the films I scored highest were the ones I least enjoyed watching. Not because they were bad. Because they were uncomfortable. Because they asked me to sit with something I would rather not sit with, and I sat with it, and the sitting changed something in me, and the change was not pleasant but it was real.

I want to talk about that gap, between the films that comforted me and the films that unsettled me, because I think it is the most honest thing I can say about Australian cinema in 2025.

The comfortable ones

There were plenty. I do not mean that as a dismissal. Comfort is a legitimate function of cinema and I am tired of the critical reflex that treats accessibility as a failure of ambition. The romantic comedies were warm and competent and cast well. The documentaries about surfing and food and community were beautifully photographed and left me feeling good about the country in ways that I know are partly constructed but choose to accept. The family dramas resolved their conflicts and the characters learned their lessons and the music swelled at the right moments and I cried at two of them, genuine tears, the kind you get when a film finds the precise emotional frequency of something you have experienced yourself.

I am not going to name them individually because I do not want to condescend to them by using them as a contrast to the films I am about to praise. They were good at what they were. Several of them were the best version of what they were. I watched them on couches and in cinemas and on planes, and they did what they were supposed to do, which is to make the time pass in a way that feels like nourishment rather than waste.

But when I look at my list and I am honest with myself about which films mattered, which ones stayed, which ones I think about when I am not thinking about films, the comfortable ones are not there. They have dissolved into a general sense of warmth, a pleasant blur, the cinematic equivalent of a meal I enjoyed but cannot quite recall. This is not their failure. It is the nature of comfort. Comfort does not leave marks.

The difficult ones

The films that left marks were the ones that made me nervous. I mean nervous in a specific way. Not scared, though some of them were frightening. Not challenged, which is a word critics use when they want to compliment a film without admitting it was unpleasant. I mean nervous as in: I was not sure, while watching, whether the film was going to be worth the discomfort it was causing me. I did not know if I was being manipulated or trusted. I did not know if the filmmaker had earned the right to show me what they were showing me. That uncertainty, that suspension between trust and suspicion, is the state in which I find the films that end up mattering to me.

One of them was a drama about elder care that I went into expecting a certain kind of worthy, issue-based filmmaking and instead found something much stranger and angrier, a film that was furious about the way we warehouse the old and was not interested in making that fury palatable. The performances were raw in a way that felt genuinely exposed, not performed rawness but the kind of rawness that happens when an actor stops protecting themselves. I left the cinema agitated. I did not enjoy the agitation. The film was right to cause it.

Another was a horror film, properly terrifying, that used its genre framework to say something about isolation in rural communities that a drama would have had to be polite about. Horror gives you permission to be impolite, and this film took that permission and ran with it. The violence was not gratuitous but it was not restrained either. It was proportional to the subject, which is the hardest calibration in genre filmmaking.

What I learned about my own taste

Here is the uncomfortable admission: my taste is more conservative than I want it to be. When I scroll back through my list, my instant reactions, the one-sentence gut responses I wrote in the moment, reveal someone who wants to be comfortable. I gave high initial scores to the crowd-pleasers. I wrote things like “lovely” and “warm” and “exactly what I needed.” The films that made me nervous got cautious responses. “Not sure about this one.” “Need to think about it.” “Intense.” It was only later, days or weeks later, that the nervous films rose in my estimation and the comfortable ones sank, and even then the rising and sinking happened slowly, reluctantly, as though my taste was being dragged somewhere it did not want to go.

I think this is true of most people who watch a lot of films, and I think most people who write about films do not admit it often enough. We construct our taste retroactively. We claim we always knew the difficult film was the better one, that we left the cinema already understanding its value. We did not. We left the cinema wanting a drink and a conversation with someone who had also seen it, wanting reassurance that the discomfort was shared, that we were not alone in feeling rattled. The critical judgement comes later, after the comfort of consensus has been established.

What Australian cinema was in 2025

If I am honest, and this is the essay where I am trying to be honest, Australian cinema in 2025 was a comfortable industry that occasionally produced uncomfortable work. The infrastructure favours the accessible, the fundable, the pitchable. The films that get made are the films that can be described in a sentence to a funding body, and the films that can be described in a sentence tend to be the ones whose emotional territory is already mapped. The difficult films, the ones that made me nervous, were the ones that somehow slipped through, or were made cheaply enough that they did not need to slip through, or were made by filmmakers who had built enough credibility to be trusted with something unresolvable.

This is not a complaint about the funding system, or not only a complaint. It is an observation about the relationship between institutional support and artistic risk. The system produces good films. It produces them reliably. It does not produce them accidentally. And the non-accidental quality of the output is both its strength and its limitation. Australian cinema in 2025 was well made. It was also, with exceptions that I treasure, well behaved.

What I want from 2026

I want to be nervous more often. I want to walk into a cinema not knowing whether the film is going to be worth the two hours, not because it might be boring but because it might be difficult in ways I have not prepared for. I want filmmakers who do not know what their film is about until they have finished making it, because the films that know what they are about from the first frame are the films that comfort and dissolve. I want the funding bodies to fund at least one film a year that they are not sure about, one film that makes the committee uneasy, one film whose pitch meeting involved the word “but” more than the word “and.”

I want fewer films I can describe to friends over dinner and more films I struggle to describe at all, the ones where I start a sentence and trail off and say “you just have to see it.” Those are the films that stay. Those are the ones that are still on my list in December with the scores revised upward and the one-sentence reactions replaced by longer notes that I wrote at midnight when I could not sleep because the film was still working on me.

Forty-three Australian films. A good year. A comfortable year. I want next year to be less comfortable. I want it to leave marks.