Week 38/2026

It’s hard to see a link between the three films in this week’s selection. Yet, in spite of the unlikelihood of you going to see all three of them, the desire to draw a line between them persists. We could say there are two films likely to be liked more by young people, although there is no age limit to (re)discovering Miyazaki’s or Carpenter’s films (or anyone’s for that matter), and one film about young people.

In The Thing, a research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims. The monster is not in the shadows. It’s right in front of us. We see its host turned inside out. Terrified by this “horrendous discovery” of the flesh we’re not supposed to see, while still recognizing the person, one could have the uncanny realization that the monstrous really is inside us.

In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, a warrior princess finds herself caught between two warring nations. Meanwhile, a toxic wasteland containing enraged giant insects encroaches the land. Nausicaä tries to save her valley, torn between war and wasteland, to reconcile the worlds of man and insect. Much like his heroin, Miyazaki creates space in between. There is emptiness – what Miyazaki calls ma – the space in which a character sighs, sits, and looks at a stream. As we watch, we hold the space and tension builds.

Grands travaux is a documentary set in a vocational school in Brussels, where young students have come to learn a trade. Rather than developing a conflict-driven storyline, the film focuses on everyday actions of individual boys. “Essentially, Grands travaux is about how we might create new spaces in film. It’s a flowing geography, a movement through the polymorphous spaces inhabited by the boys."

Both Miyazaki and Carpenter have spoken about the ending of their films. We won’t be spoiling them, but both films leave things open – the tension so well-crafted, is never fully resolved; it can only calm down until a new iteration unravels. The story never ends, and then it starts over. Miyazaki said he “ended the story at the same point as we are now, at the starting point of an incomprehensible world.”