Abel Ferraradoesn’t mess around. The New York-born filmmaker is notorious for his no-holds-barred style, his meddling in between “exploitation” and “prestige” lanes, his gritty and grimy explorations of his home city and the horrible men who do horrible things in them, and for his encapsulation of a certain, vital strain of American independent cinema. Ferrara, born in 1951, makes movies that feel a little quieter now, and tends to trade NYC for Europe. But his work has lost none of its spark, intention, experimentation, nor independence.
He’s a directorial force to be reckoned with, one that fans of tough, hardboiled cinema should absolutely explore. And if you’re looking for a place to start, we’ve collected 10 of his many movies to give you a broad overview and representative taste of why Abel Ferrara is an important director, from his ’70s/’80s exploitation roots, to his unimpeachable run in the ’90s, to the haunting, alive works he makes today.
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The Driller Killer
Yes,The Driller Killeris about a killer who uses a gnarly power tool to dispatch his victims. But it’s much more than an ultraviolent, controversial video nasty — a denigrated status which moral panic disseminators tried to paint the film upon its release. Ferrara’s “legitimate” feature film debut (he previously made a porno film under a pseudonym) finds the director himself in the title role, a frenetic, fraying, and unstable portrait of male ego, artistic ambition, and complete misery in an environment. Films as wide-varying asAmerican Psycho,Buffalo ‘66, andScott Pilgrim vs. The Worldowe their respects toThe Driller Killer, a peculiarly compelling and wide-ranging lightning strike against concepts like “alternative youth culture,” “the corrupt New York streets,” and eventually, “the burden of consciousness.” It’s full of rage and derision, especially at itself, but it’s intentional, full of giallo-leaning stylistic flourishes of surreal violence and proto-mumblecore-leaning vignettes of mere existence. Plus, you get to see Ferrara lay the groundwork for many of his pet interests, especially the intersections between Catholicism and moral degradation.
Grimy, relentlessly provocative, stylish, and transformative, it is a minor miracle thatMs .45remains this watchable in this day and age. A revenge thriller in dialogue with its contemporaries (Taxi Driver) and influential in its wake (Kill Bill), our title vigilante is Thana (Zoë Lund, involved in the conception of her characterfrom the start), a mute clothing maker who is attacked and sexually assaulted twice in a row, resulting in a visceral, psychologically complicated descent into madness and vengeance. The images Ferrara conjures are grotesque and compelling, with Lund’s steely presence cutting through some of the ambiguity to center the picture with a sharp, weighted anchor. The final action set piece, in which Lund infamously dons a nun costume, is among one of the most incendiary pieces of genre filmmaking anyone will ever make, and Ferrara ensures his audience stays right on the razor wire of empathy and disgust throughout. An absolute bullet of a picture, that rips through all your organs and makes you need to know more about the woman who fired the gun.
China Girl
Simply, it’sRomeo and Julietwith Italian gangs and Chinese gangs. But in this simplicity, this primal scream of love among a pain-stricken world, Ferrara finds the strongest emotional pull of his career yet.China Girlis a tactile, heartfelt, and wholly gripping picture, feeling more vital and alive than any “star-crossed lovers” fil1ms in its wake. The performances are uniformly outstanding, with each side of the gang rivalry allowed to inhabit fully-formed human beings instead of superficial stereotypes. Ferrara has a sense of patience and control in his visual language, using the nightscapes of Manhattan as brilliant tableaus of found beauty and horror. And the screenplay, from regular Ferrara collaboratorNicholas St. John, subtly examines the depths and motivations of hate in elucidating but nevertheless entertaining ways. Plus, you get to watch someone callDavid Carusoa “racist little shit,” and that feels really good.
King of New York
This just might be Ferrara’s most purely effective play into “mainstream” cinema. But even then,King of New Yorkplays with a sense of sparseness and grimness not seen even in any of its peers during this mini golden age of crime cinema (New Jack City,Goodfellas, andDeep Coverare just some of the similar films released in this early ‘90s period). You don’t necessarily “learn” anything about the characters played by this star-studded cast —Christopher Walken,Laurence Fishburne,David Caruso,Wesley Snipes,Giancarlo Esposito,Steve Buscemi— but it’s because they seem to have always existed, towering luminously in every frame, making their totemic claims for power and “justice” out of symbolic obligation rather than visceral desire. It’s stylishly, confidently made, just as willing to slow down to near-stillness to observe its characters behaving outside of the plot as it is to ramp things up in wholly upsetting spurts of violence. Procedural not just in the machinations of running a powerful crime syndicate but in every facet of human interaction surrounding it,King of New Yorkfeels in some way like a leaner, meanerThe Irishman. Its final shot will make you gasp.
IfKing of New Yorkis one of Ferrara’s most “mainstream” works, Bad Lieutenant is where his “mainstream” and “art-trash” sensibilities collided the most purely, arguably becoming the director’s most well-known film.Bad Lieutenantfeels like Ferrara tapping back into the impulses and aims ofThe Driller Killer, with the slower, more prestigious crime trappings of his ‘90s era. This time, our central figure of destruction in every angle isHarvey Keitel, whose performance just obliterates the screen. He oozes pain and literally naked vulnerability. His corrupt cop is objectively vile, pushing the limits of whether we want to see a character go through a redemptive arc, yet rendering us unable to look away. Ferrara also pushes the idea of immorality as it relates to Catholicism — an idea seen in bothDriller KillerandMs .45— to its absolute breaking point, culminating in an eviscerating, surreal moment of seeking penance (one that, if I’m gonna keep on my “modern Scorsese owes a lot to ‘90s Ferrara” tip, feels similar to Scorsese’sSilence). Steel yourself before watching this one.
Body Snatchers
King of New Yorkplays accessibly for wide audiences, but still feels like a natural extension of what we’ve seen the director do thus far.Body Snatchers, on the other hand, is a brief dip of the toe into an alternate reality where Ferrara becomes a completely different director, a filmmaker fully subsumed by the mainstream studio system wandering from script to script. As its title indicates, it’s another take onInvasion of the Body Snatchers, the simple sci-fi/horror story where alien forces burrow into human bodies as pods and take them over. Ferrara and one of his regular DPsBojan Bazelliexpand their aspect ratio to a 2.4:1 frame, and use it with striking intention, filling the frame with multiple subjects in slick moves. The film feels a little likeSteven Spielbergwith brass knuckles, and not just in its visual construction; the screenplay (rewritten by Ferrara’s regular writer St. John, but with tons of cooks in the kitchen) wants to present this as a classic allegory of a broken family brought together by an appealingly genre trauma, but can’t help get caught in the true devastation of such brokenness.Meg Tilly, as the stepmom of this struggling family, delivers one of the greatest monologues in a horror film you’ll ever see, kicking off the picture into an absolutely bone-crunching second half of menace and madness. In this alternate reality whereBody Snatcherswas a giant success that scratched Ferrara’s creative itch, he could’ve used this as a springboard into studio filmmaking, perhaps even finding his way into making something like an ultra-grittyBatmantake. Instead, it’s an out-of-ordinary, fascinating, and downright shocking digression for the director.
The Addiction
My favorite Ferrara films tend to keep their allegorical, philosophical, and religious explorations purely visual, while keeping their characters’ dialogue purposeful only to what’s in front of them, allowing their audience to connect the dots. There are obvious exceptions to this formula, i.e. Keitel screaming at a literal deity inBad Lieutenant. But inThe Addiction, Ferrara throws the whole chalkboard out the window, using genre as a sneaky spoonful of sugar to give us the medicine of tons, and tons, and tons of talking about allegory, philosophy, and religion.
Shot in captivating, stunning black-and-white photography (Ken Kelsch, one of Ferrara’s other regular DPs, working beautifully in 35mm),The AddictioncastsLili Tayloras a philosophy grad student who, after a horrific but curiously detached attack fromAnnabella Sciorra, finds herself becoming a vampire. From this point on, Taylor struggles with her latent vampirism in the same way a drug addict struggles, alternating between wanting to succumb to her hedonistic, even punitive pleasures of feeding on the impotent, bourgeois class of pretentious thinkers around her, and wanting to stop and find peace, repent, attain forgiveness. We know these allegories because they are, I cannot stress this enough, spoken about explicitly and relentlessly; Christopher Walken shows up again as a reformed former-vampire who literally recommends readingNaked Lunchas a way for Taylor to find enlightenment, like some kind of supernatural cringe-inducer you’d run into at a college party.
But the film works, playing like a pleading need to be stated and listened to. It’s didactic, yes, but also upsetting, beautiful, and staged with a sense of non-artificial coolness, almost like a byproduct of its need to talk about these issues in this manner. For those who like their genre films arted up — especially fans ofOnly Lovers Left AliveorA Girl Walks Home Alone at Night—The Addictionwill sink its fangs into you and keep them there until you get it. In a filmography full of genre explorations of nihilism, this one might be the purest of both variables in the equation.
The Funeral
As its title suggests,The Funeralis often elegiac in tone, and classically, reverently constructed. But grief manifests itself in many curious ways, and Ferrara is not in any way interested in covering up these pains, regrets, and need for cosmic justice with any kind of “adult drama nominated for Best Picture” sheen (another alternate career I could see Ferrara going down if this film took off more). The Ferrara-esque director ofBuffalo ‘66himself,Vincent Gallo, plays the subject of our funeral, a dead criminal whose two criminal brothers, Christopher Walken and a never-betterChris Penn, do their best to hold an appropriate funeral for the family while navigating through the underworld of 1930s crime-drenched New York to find the killer. In impeccably staged sequences with sumptuous production design, Ferrara and St. John fold the film in on itself over and over again, using such a foundational part of humanity — death, and how we react to it — to stare at the abyss over and over again. Somehow the film never lapses into pretension nor self-satisfaction, crackling between scenes of painfully understandable emotions and procedure-motivated action. It’s a deep, deep, deep movie with a stacked cast (that also includesBenicio del Toro,Isabella Rossellini, Annabella Sciorra, andGretchen Mol) and a mesmerizing trip through a rich, complicated era of American history. A primal Greek tragedy that’s still more than willing to put its arm around you and buy you a cognac.
Unlike many of Ferrara’s other films, which start from a place of interior darkness and only get exacerbated by the exterior world’s darkness,Pasoliniis centralized around a desire for lightness and pleasure — even as the surrounding world gets darker and darker. The film is a biopic of sorts, of influential, notorious Italian directorPier Paolo Pasolini(Willem Dafoe, underplaying it beautifully) in the final days of his life, right after the release of hisdisturbing, politically chargedSalò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and right before his sudden murder. Images and themes from Pasolini’s films are woven into Ferrara’sPasoliniseamlessly, surreally but quietly, revealing that both Ferrara and Pasolini’s ostensible works of muckraking pack a huge amount of humanity at the center of their “depraved” images.Pasolinifeatures frank images and discussions of explicit sex, yes, but it is to express an utterly human, understandable response to a society hellbent on oppressing those who dare seek and live in any kind of personal freedom. One of Ferrara’s quietest films is also one of his most enriching, enthralling, and beautiful. A perfect example of the kinds of work and aesthetics Ferrara likes to explore in his later years. And he does it all under 90 minutes!
Siberiacontains some of the best edits of Ferrara’s career, careening explosively from the plaintive, quiet pleasures of an ideal life to the shocking, brutal, phantasmagorical horrors that cannot help but intrude. Willem Dafoe continues his Ferrara collaborations as a man who operates a little-visited bar on the outskirts of a frozen tundra, before cascading into a journey of… everything. Are these images he finds the uncaring brutalities of the world? The subconsciously adorned brutalities of humanity? The shadowy hallucinations of a man at the end, desperate to make sense of his senseless life?
Somehow,Siberiapresents images that fit all of these descriptions and, like, 19 more. It’s one of the most stripped and genre-less pictures of Ferrara’s career, yet also one of the most stuffed with “ideas.” Somehow, Ferrara has cut through the bullshit of any cinematic trappings to find a sense of “truth” by stuffing his cinematic outburst with as much pretentious bullshit as I’ve ever seen. It’s like ifAndreiTarkovskydirectedmother!It has a monologue from Dafoe as a stereotypical “Dad” to his younger self full of odd specifics about fishing, trucks, and Hawaiian Punch. This monologue takes place in what I might call a “demon cave.” I cannot recommend you watch it enough.
Siberiaoriginally debuted in festivals in 2020, when Ferrara was 69 years old. If this is the kind of provocative, bold, confident, and ceaselessly wondering stuff he’s still making now, I can’t wait to see what comes next — even if the film manages to stab at some kind of conclusion he’s been looking for.
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