Sightlines · a viewing thread

Bodies at the End of the World

A run of visionary, punishing films where flesh is scarred, melted, mechanized or sacrificed while the world tips into its last days — watch these back to back when you want cinema at its most extreme and transcendent.

Mostly cult objects and demanding arthouse with two blockbuster outliers as the way in; several are genuinely devastating, so this is a strong-stomach, watch-when-ready run rather than a casual night.

• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997)
• Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
• Mad God (2021)
• Hard to Be a God (2014)
• On the Silver Globe (1989)
• Barefoot Gen (1983)
• Battle Royale (2000)
• The Passion of the Christ (2004)
• The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
• The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
• Memories (1995)
• Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) — The Rebuild finale you queued after End of Evangelion and never finished — Anno's other apocalypse, ruined Earth and biomech flesh, resolving the exact cosmic sacrifice these films circle.
• Akira (1988) — If Tetsuo's mutating iron-flesh landed, this is the under-seen-in-full one to finally pull down — Neo-Tokyo built on a crater, Tetsuo's body swelling into monstrous meat as the city ends again.
• Berserk: The Golden Age Arc III - The Advent (2013) — The overlooked one that rhymes with the sacrifice films — the Eclipse turns a whole band of comrades into devoured flesh in a demon-birthing apocalypse as pitiless as anything here.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion (2013) — The dark magical-girl finale gathering dust on your list — a cosmic self-sacrifice rewriting the rules of reality, visionary and devastating in exactly End of Evangelion's key.
• Godzilla Minus One (2023) — The accessible way in that rhymes with Barefoot Gen — postwar Japan as a flattened, apocalyptic ruin, a kamikaze pilot's survivor's guilt and the pull toward sacrifice, a world already ended that the survivors have to crawl out of.