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Coralie Fargeat, Malcolm Washington, Halina Reijn and More Deliver Bold Visions to Join Variety’s 2025 Directors to Watch
Variety's 2025 Directors to Watch list features Coralie Fargeat ("The Substance"), Malcolm Washington ("The Piano Lesson") and Halina Reijn ("Babygirl").
The gory finale of “The Substance” combines that discomfort with a critique of the expectations society puts on women: “In real life, we’re asked to be normal, rational, delicate, structured and gentle most of the time, and I love to do the exact opposite in my movies,” Fargeat explains. The writer-director of the upcoming film “Companion” had been making a solid living in Hollywood, getting his foot in the door working on Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab’s alt-comedy springboard “Channel 101” before scoring staff writing gigs at shows like “Blue Mountain State” and “Suburgatory.” He spent 10 years developing a comfortable life but feeling like he had no control over his career. The complexity and nuance of the relationships between the characters played by Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas — not to mention what Reijn calls her “European version of a happy ending” — marks not just a tremendous leveling up in sophistication from the filmmaker’s earlier work, but her triumphant arrival as an international force to be reckoned with.
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