Skip to main content
Close

Top 10 Supernatural Films

By Keaton Ziem · April 27, 2012

What is the 'Supernatural' film? For me, it is the gulf that separates the islands of fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres– it exists within the realm of phenomena that is barely within believability to be scientifically explained, but just slippery enough to elude true rationalization. The Supernatural film is as inexplicable as our own dreams are, or the sensation of deja vu, or whatever lies beyond any single person's ability to understand fully within the context of reality.

Because of this, the 'Supernatural' film is capable of encompassing many different types of movie. We have all seen the horror film that doesn't restrict itself to the commonly understood boarders of most horror films: it may chill and thrill, but it lacks the vision or feel of most mainstream horror films. Or perhaps a film that might fall within the slippery and vague genre of straight 'drama', but aspires to tell a story that possesses elements that fall beyond what many of us consider a 'normal' state of existence for the characters within the tale. Or a science fiction story that broaches subjects that science, for all it's rigidity, would rather avoid. Or a fantasy that is too grounded in the 'real world' to be considered a true departure into an entirely imagined world.

The Supernatural film is more a state of mind than it is an investigation of any tangible struggle, and because of this, the protagonist of the Supernatural film is plagued with the curse (or blessing) of seeing a world that others are incapable of seeing—either because they cannot, or because they will not. Supernatural films give the audience a unique insight into a world of intangibles and have been one of the most rewarding genres for investigating the best of what life, and all it's mysteries, have to offer.

Here, I will humbly submit my personal Top 10 Supernatural Films for your consideration. Some involve ghosts, some involve ghouls, some contemplate nothing but the unexplainable miracle of the human heart and mind.

Most times, just that is enough.

10. Toy Story (1995)

It's easy to forget now, sitting comfortably in 2012 after seeing a string of remarkably successful films produced by Pixar (which includes two sequels to this tale), but Toy Story was by itself an unbelievable film achievement—on par with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). A movie that single-handedly began the full-length CGI animated feature film. Toy Story was undeniably the first of it's kind, and since its release there have been countless others.

And being the first of its kind comes with a risk. Who knew that the trend of CGI animation would catch on? Toy Story changed the game, turning CGI from the exception to the rule, and going back and revisiting the first installment of Pixar's legacy, it's not hard to understand why.

Growing up, my toys had personalities, behaviors, idiosyncrasies, wants, needs and desires beyond my own. I was nothing more than a vessel for these otherwise inanimate characters, allowing them to act out the drama of their toyhood through the imagination of my boyhood. The fact that their individual storylines continued after I put them away and left the room wasn't fantasy, it was a fact that went without mentioning. It was only after I had grown up and my imagination boycotted that these toys lost their identities, either in or out of my sight.

But this is the element of what makes Toy Story so joyful. Not only are the Toys sentient, they're self aware; they acknowledge their roles as toys, and their personalities reflect their functions. The toy you are dictates the personality you have (or vice-versa), sometimes accurately (Woody and Buzz are the leaders, as only a cowboy and space ranger could be), and sometimes ironically (Rex the Tyrannosaurus Rex is a monster menace in the hands of Andy's childish imagination, but a nervous Tyrannosaurus-wreck otherwise).

What makes the film an excellent adventure into the supernatural is that once the rule that these toys are conscious individuals is established, it's never questioned—it's accepted by the audience as fact. This makes Toy Story as fun, adventurous, and entertaining as it is existential. If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and nobody's there to hear it, it may or may not make a sound. But if a toy is left alone in a room and no one is there to watch it, everyone knows it's going to get up and keep an eye on things while you're gone.

Name another film that makes such a philosophic statement while being so unquestionably accessible to as wide a range of audience members. I'm not sure one exists, making Toy Story unequaled in it's success.

9. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko (2001) is the Supernatural drama of adolescence, supposing that the unexplainable mysteries of our teenage years are as attributable to the horrors of hormones and high school as they are the result of time travel, wormholes and quantum physics.

Examining high concept drama through the microscope of teenage angst isn't new to movies, not today and not when Donnie Darko was made. Adults have been relating to children/adolescent protagonists in film throughout the history of cinema, seeing through their eyes the adult world they are destined (or doomed) to grow into and inherit. Yet few films do so within the paradigm of a genre as well as Donnie Darko does (one that comes to mind is Brick (2005), that combines the noir style with the complexities of high school social life).

Donnie Darko is as much a film about coming to terms with our mistakes and shortcomings as it is about the condition of the family unit, and the social graces we're expected to adhere to as we grow up, even if we'd rather rebel against them. It's about high-concept science fiction, and it's about puppy love. Because it aspires to combine such a wide range of ideas (it is, after all, very much an idea movie, with characters who's only function in the story is to address these ideas for the audience's exclusive benefit (Drew Barrymore)), it is a film that is guilty of some hard-to-ignore muddiness. But despite this muddiness, the film has a lot of tender things to say about self-sacrifice and bravery, as well as presenting a touching dichotomy of strong women who seem incumbered, even victimized, by a male dominated world. In fact, Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) himself is the only sympathetic male in the film—the rest are either laughable buffoons (Eddie Darko, Donnie's father) or downright evil (the motivational speaker who is berated by Donnie at a school assembly, only to be revealed as a pedophile later).

The characters of the film exist in a world rife with supernatural implications—for which only Donnie is a conduit. He then becomes the film's only hero, as he is the only character capable of acknowledging the supernatural forces at play (maddeningly). This is not unlike what adolescent life can sometimes feel like, growing up, and the writing does an excellent job of presenting this separation between Donnie and the rest of the world This is what makes his sacrifice all the more potent and significant, even if it is utterly thankless. The film's only shortcoming is that it's ideas aren't clearly defined or made easily understandable. The film's saving grace is that the emotions that fuels the hero's choices are defined and clear. Because Donnie is a real and struggling teenage boy, his supernatural struggles seem real enough for the audience to follow, even if it doesn't make total sense.

8. Spirited Away (2001)

I knew master animator and director Hideo Miyazaki deserved a place on this list; a filmmaker who has made the supernatural world his domain and expertise, though deciding on which film would represent his achievements was difficult to come to. Howl's Moving Castle (2004), or Princess Mononoke (1997) are both worthy candidates, but I finally came to Spirited Away because it's a film that is so effortless to watch, from start to finish.

By 'effortless' I mean that from the onset, the audience—like the film's heroine Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi)–is pushed from a seemingly innocent and harmless story about a little girl accepting her family's relocation to a new town, into a scenario we are incapable of easily escaping. Chihiro is unwittingly forced to navigate the amazing and complex world of the demon bathhouse just as we are little-by-little exposed to it ourselves. Before we know it, from such humble beginnings we find our heroine and ourselves up to our necks in trouble. The story and the plot wash over us easily and gracefully, without us being aware of what's happening. In this way, we find our own imaginations embroiled in this fanciful tale so naturally and unobtrusively that it's not until the end of the film that we realize what's come over us.

Like all Miyazaki adventures, Spirited Away is a feast for the imagination where anything is possible. However, in much the same way that Alice navigates Wonderland, Chihiro resolves every impossible obstacle with common sense and upstanding virtues; two tactics this fantastic world seldom encounters, and she is served well by employing them. This makes her an unexpected source of intelligence and resilience in the story, especially after our initial impression of her at the beginning of the film. She assumes these virtues naturally and out of a necessity for survival in this amazing world, making it a moral to a tale that is achieved rather than dictated by the will of the writer, or forced upon us as we view it's progression from start to finish.

Spirited Away is a truly enjoyable and rare film experience—a true exercise of the imagination that is uncommonly joyful. And considering how fantastic and supernatural the tale becomes, we are remarkably lost within its boarder-less world, forgetting that it's a movie—an animated one at that—that is treating us to this adventure.

7. Enter The Void (2009)

Enter The Void is a dense and complicated film, both in it's story and in the manner in which it's presented to us. Rather than the typical protagonist/audience relationship, where we are meant to see ourselves as the main character, the main character actually becomes one of us—viewing his own life from our perspective, and through this communion with the hero we are drawn into the difficult story of his life and death, compounded with the life of his living sister with growing love and anxiety.

The role the camera plays in the film, as the never-blinking eye of the protagonist/audience's  consciousness, gives us a difficult but deceptively attractive perspective on the story as it plays out. From the very first shot of the film, the camera is positioned from the point of view of the main character, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). We experience his final moments of life from his individual perspective, seeing precisely what he sees, in real time, until the moment of his death.

It's at this point that our view of the story's narrative becomes altered, or 'shifts', even if our point of view remains tied with Oscar. The camera 'floats', shifting Oscar's character, and the audience's perspective, from a first-person account to a third-person account. Oscar and the audience are then taken on a journey following the exploits of his friends, foes, and loved ones after his death—in addition to gaining insight into a lifetime bond he shared with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta).

The film contemplates on the implications of life and death, and the responsibilities we individuals owe to the other lives that surround our own, even after our deaths. It's also a film that considers the possibilities and potentials of reincarnation with a bitterness that illustrates what a conjugation of joy and tragedy life can be.

Because of the subject matter, the film is challenging. Because of how it's shown to the audience, and how it actively forces the audience to engage in the story, it is a special film that deserves recognition on this list. Despite these things, it's a film heady to the point of being unapproachable, even indecipherable—though unstoppable once the audience begins the journey. It's a film that challenges the audience to reevaluate our individual perceptions of life and death. As I watched it, I often wondered if our commonly acknowledged estimation is correct; that life is life and death is death. Enter The Void blurs and shades the differences between the two, and brought me to wonder if life is only a slow and constant death, and that death is a sudden and eventual rebirth.

No matter. One of these days, I'll dare to Enter The Void again. Maybe a second viewing will give me a clearer grasp it's precepts.

However, one viewing is certainly enough to last a lifetime.

6. The Seventh Seal (1957)

What Igmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) lacks in subtlety and nuance it actively takes by making an overt ideological statement concerning the mysterious (and unforgiving) relationship good and evil have on the lives of men and women. In so doing, the film makes an uncompromising statement about God, and the role 'He' plays in the lives of his creations—specifically, His complete absence in the struggle between good and evil.

“My indifference has shut me out. I live in a world of ghosts, a prisoner of dreams. I want God to put out his hand, show his face, speak to me. I cry out to him in the dark but there is no one there.

The Knight (Max von Sydow) confesses this to Death (Bengt Ekerot) who comes to him disguised (or impersonating) a priest. As The Knight's confession suggests, the film, and its characters, occupy a landscape of a distraught human soul, one that is viewed in a world of high-contrast black and white that personifies The Knight's struggle to understand the nature of good and evil, God and the Devil, life and death.

At the very beginning, Death comes to The Knight. A wager is made; that Death will allow The Knight to live as long as their chess match can last. As the two play, The Knight and his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) travel the European countryside upon returning from the crusades only to bare witness not just on the condition of his native land, but of the state of civilization itself; plagued as it is with disease, famine, sin and guilt.

Through the prism of what life and The Church was in the dark ages, the audience is made to compare that dark age with what possible dark ages we occupy today, and if the relationship between good and evil, man and God, life and death has changed much, if at all, in the historic context and passage of time. The Seventh Seal is a special and unique film, crafted by a master filmmaker at the height of his powers, that is bold, direct and overt in it's intentions. Such a film is a rarity in cinema, even more so now than it was when it was made, though it was unprecedented in its time. It's a film that heavily meditates on the supposed existence of God, and questions the audience's own opinions about whether or not God exists—and if He does, what can we know about him based upon the injustices we see around us every day? Yet, compounded with that exists even more not-so-subtle questions beneath the mere existence of God, but also the existence of goodness, of righteousness, and also the existence of meaning to life.

And either ironically, or rightfully, the film ends with dancing—a parade led by Death itself.

5. The Exorcist (1973)

I expect that The Exorcist would also fit quite nicely within the top five of any greatest horror films ever made as well, and deservedly so. Few films are as fundamentally shocking and terrifying as The Exorcist. Yet I believe that it also deserves a spot here in the category of Supernatural film as well, because in addition to being a paramount horror film, it also serves as a statement about the power of faith, and the ambiguities of the human psyche. The catharsis of the characters involved, and the conclusions they come to, is the horror of not knowing whether the faith that restored the young girl back to herself again was genuine, or imagined—which only goes to serve faith's own slippery and delicate reputation.

There is a constant question to the sincerity of Regan's (Linda Blair) 'demonic possession'. Everyone who encounters her, from her own mother (Ellen Burstyn), Father Karras (Jason Miller), and the endless parade of doctors, psychiatrists, scientists and priests who examine her, all doubt the nature of her behavior. And I say 'behavior' advisedly, because as much as there is an argument to her being genuinely possessed by a demonic force, there is something to be said for the possibility that it is simply a psychosomatic, self-induced insanity that exists only in Regan's mind.

Significantly, the only two people in the story who fully and unquestionably believe that it is 'The Devil' that is plaguing this young girl is Regan herself, and the stoic Father Merrin (Max von Sydow again). Because of this, it doesn't matter whether or not Regan's case is an instance of genuine demonic possession or not; it's her faith that she is possessed that fuels her behavior, as much as it is Father Merrin's belief in exorcism that comes to cure her of it.

It is also Father Merrin's belief in the power of Christ that brings Father Karras to salvation—for in watching the exorcism unfold, first hand, his wavering faith is given a foundation upon which it can firmly plant itself. Throughout Karras' journey in the film, his success with the demon is limited because the demon/Regan knows he is weak in faith. Yet his experiences with the demon and Father Merrin allow him to come to a new plateau of personal and spiritual resolve, making a profoundly Christ-like sacrifice by taking the demon into himself in order to save young Regan. In so doing, he saves the many people who's lives have been perturbed by the demon, Regan most of all—as he throws himself out the window to rid everyone's conscious of it's evil.

Was the demon truly a satanic force, or was it only Regan's own subconscious lashing out at the world in a way that a young girl was incapable of lashing out? It's important to remember that Regan is a young girl, approaching womanhood with a flighty mother role model and undergoing a stressful and turbulent relationship with an absent father. There is a strong case for the demon existing solely within this young girl's mind.

Yet, demon or not, it's interesting to note who is ultimately the victims in the film. After the event has passed, Regan has no conscious memory of the horrors she underwent. Yet, her loved ones will always remember the profanities—verbal and physical—the lovely young girl turned monster attempted. They will be forever scarred long after Regan's physical bruises heal. The demon targeted the mother, and Father Karras most of all—it's tool of attacking them was the innocent young woman it occupied as a vessel.

Father Karras escaped, in death—but what will become of the mother?

Uncertainty is perhaps the most significant horror of all.

4. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

There have been many interpretations of Jesus on film, but each one's main function has served only to solidify in our culture the image of Jesus, the purported Messiah, that we already know.

The Passion of the Christ (2004), the celebrated miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and to a lesser degree The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) provide little new insight into the essential paradox of Christian faith that hinges upon Jesus being supernaturally divine, and entirely, unquestionably human.

The latter three examples that decipher the Jesus quandary on film approach this dilemma by presenting, more or less, a Hallmark version of Jesus; starry-eyed, halo-crowned, good and kind beyond doubt. Their central focus is to present the audience, full of individual people with their day-to-day problems, shortcomings, vices and weaknesses, with a character of undeniable total goodness in order to meditate upon how far we fall short of his example. This has served to inspire people of the Christian faith as much as it has solidified everyone else in their disbelief in not only Jesus' claim to 'divinity', but also to his very existence.

Yet, in painting a portrait of a character who is wholly divine, the potential in portraying the character of Jesus is robbed of it's potency: if Jesus is God, then what challenge does sin, petty weaknesses, and vice pose to him? And if there is no challenge, where is the struggle? The conflict? What does the protagont-Jesus have to lose, what does he have to gain? Where's the drama? The emotion? What makes the audience care whether he's crucified or not?

This has been, by and large, the reason that most Jesus Christ movies are fundamentally boring (Mel Gibson, knowing this, depicted the most violent final hours of Jesus' life—y'know, to keep the audience's interest), and why most actors who have portrayed the Son of God look as though their directors have told them only to look into the distance and be 'God-like'.

This is what makes The Last Temptation of Christ so unique, and so valuable, as a tale that depicts the life and death of Jesus. It uses the audience's preconceived knowledge about who Jesus was and how his story went and turns it, manipulates it, contorts it, forcing audiences to watch the story unfold as if for the very first time—and this time, with new implications. The film opens with Jesus, the carpenter, building crucifixes for Rome in order to crucify Israel's self-ordained Messiahs and prophets. Jesus himself is weak, small, fearful, and afflicted with bouts of violent insanity. He is a constant spring of shame to his mother, Mary, and hated by his community—Judas Iscariot chief among them; a God-fearing warrior who will do anything to vanquish Rome's grip on their country.

The film opens with Jesus as the most dejected, sinful, self-hating character in the film, which celebrates the human element of the Christ story by, little by little, showing how each of this afflicted man's shortcomings are overcome—one by one—until the only thing that remains before us is a man who has healed himself of all of life's petty meanness. By the end, Jesus is a good and righteous man—but more importantly, he's a man totally transformed from the person he started out as. It also qualifies his message as he tells men and women to tolerate the shortcomings and sins of others. It's no longer a case of a perfect being telling us it's okay to make mistakes—it's a case of a man who has made many terrible mistakes in life, has learned to overcome them, and tells us, reassuringly, that we can do the same. It changes a commonly understood story of mere tolerance to a story of helpful patience; in the same way a Father might be patient with his Son.

Jesus' life in the film presents the human aspect of Jesus—yet, throughout his crucifixion, the audience is thrown through yet another series of loops as we venture into the divine aspect of Christ, as we follow his rejection of the cross and pursuit of married life. He rejects his own prior teachings, rejects the new testament, and desires only the life he has denied himself undertaking since he took up his ministry: to raise a family, to live a long and bittersweet life, and to die an old withered man, just like everyone else.

The audience, shocked, knows this is not how the story goes. It ends on the cross. Devout Christian and strict agnostic alike, they all know there was no life for Jesus beyond death on the cross. Yet, in a way, the audience should have known this conflict was coming—the title of the film, after all, reveals that the major catharsis of the film reflects upon the primary, and final, temptation presented to Christ by “Satan”—the temptation to live a totally mortal life, to reject all that is good and divine, and to be simply (and happily) human.

It all climaxes into one of the most powerful performances I've witnessed in film, and in a rush we are suddenly presented with the divine of Christ, compounded by the two hours of human Jesus we've been treated to—giving new weight and significance to the claim 'It is accomplished!'. The film is a celebration of what is supernatural within the human spirit, and the human heart. It's a meditation on how human flesh, and human spirit, are always in conflict—and are only seldom in harmony together. The Last Temptation of Christ uses the character of Jesus to present us with this conflict so that we can watch not how a Messiah wasborn, but how a Messiah is made, one day at a time, one mistake after another, one lesson learned after the next.

3. The Shining (1980)

Fans of The Shining, or fans of Kubrick, are familiar with some of the storied examples of his loveable, though sometimes horrifying, eccentricities. One such account sums up much of the legendary director's attitude and approach to adapting Stephen King's horror/supernatural novel into one of the most prominent horror/thriller masterpieces of all time.

Stephen King himself refers to his very first conversation with Kubrick “via an early morning phone call. King recalled the first thing Kubrick did was to immediately start talking about how optimistic ghost stories are, because they suggest that humans survive death. 'What about hell?', King asked. Kubrick paused for several moments before finally replying, 'I don't believe in hell.'” -imdb.com, The Shining (1980) – Trivia

Kubrick may not have believed in a hell after death, but that was perhaps because, in The Shining, the Torrance family exists within a living hell.

One element of The Shining that makes it so successful as a supernatural masterwork is its well-crafted ambiguity. The film, scene-for-scene, implies without stating, suggests without defining, and hints without solving any of it's mysteries. And while these subtleties normally serve only to aggravate and frustrate audiences, in Kubrick's case he uses them to fuel our own paranoia and anxiety as the film's tension mounts to ever-greater heights. Is the Overlook Hotel sincerely, genuinely haunted, or is the presence of Grady, Lloyd and the partygoers only the imagined echoes of Jack and Danny's psychosis?

In addition to being probably the single greatest horror film ever made, the film also serves as one of the paramount satires on the modern family unit, with a particular attention to husband/father  domestic violence. In fact, upon multiple viewings it seems to me that this is actually the storythat Kubrick is telling, set within the context and backdrop of a supernatural horror film to disguise or otherwise cover his tracks. The Shining, to me, is just as much about battery within the family as Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut is about marital infidelity.

For all of Jack Nicholson's over-the-top, James Cagney-esque performance, and despite all of the story's blatant shocks and horrors (entire hallways bathed in 'rusty pipe water', half-rotted corpses of promiscuous old women, etc.), the film has eerily subtle introspective moments—long stretches of time where the audience is left alone in Jack's menacing, silent presence for uncomfortably long stretches of time. A brooding meditation is taking place, a violent imagination quietly brewing, and without words these reflections of a coming horror are telegraphed (via The Shine?) to the audience. And for a while, that's as far as the violence is allowed to go—until the remarkably tense scene where Danny happens across Jack, sitting up in bed, on his way to get his toy fire truck. The scene that plays out is understated; father and son speak words without conversing, talking without content, until Danny is brave enough to broach the disquieting suspicion he has about his father in the form of a question, “You'd never do anything to hurt Mom and me, would ya Dad?”

Which may have been the question that brought the possibility of it to Jack's mind in the first place. Perhaps asking the question made the hurt to come an unavoidable inevitability.

Still, it's important to remember that Stanley, by his own admission, was making a very optimistic film.

2. Groundhog Day (1993)

I'm convinced that there is no other film that is as infinitely rewatchable as Groundhog Day. In fact, no other movie does such a great job of actually increasing your sympathy with its main character the more you watch it. The more times you view it, the closer you come to memorizing every bit of dialogue, the more you come to understand the gravity of Phil Connors (Bill Murray's) uncanny predicament.

Also, even more remarkably, there is nothing in the film to suggest what is even the cause of Phil's dilemma, and it never prevents the audience from unquestionably going along with the story. All we know is that Phil is a jerk, and for every day that Phil is a jerk, he must relive that day over and over again, and once Phil stops being a jerk, not only is the spell broken but Phil finds himself a better, happier individual.

Groundhog Day then becomes a penultimate supernatural film; it exemplifies a truly supernatural phenomenon that is beyond comprehension and rationalization, while still demonstrating a clearly defined lesson that needs to be learned.

There have been many things written in response to this film; supposedly, some Buddhists have incorporated its message into a modern day representation of their philosophy and teachings. Also, the film also serves as a functional example of the Kubler-Ross model of the Five Stages of Grief. We see Phil embody each of these five stages of grief; Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression on his way to its final stage: Acceptance. Once acceptance is achieved, Phil reaches a new plateau of understanding, and thus, the cycle of Groundhog Day is allowed to snap, and a new day has never had more amazing and infinite possibilities than the first day of the rest of Phil Connors' life.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more simultaneously entertaining and enlightening film. The movie is just undeniably fun to watch, while establishing the viewer with a refreshed perspective on life, and how we as individuals choose to live it. At every stage of Phil's 'recovery', we understand his attitude completely. Who wouldn't attempt the things Phil does with his newfound 'god-like' powers?

Some schools of thought say that Phil Connors lived Groundhog Day over and over for 10,000 years. If 10,000 years could turn the Phil Connors we started out with into the Phil Connors we end up with, imagine what it could do with us.

1. Fearless (1993)

“This is it. This is the moment of my death.”

Fearless is a film that confronts this moment, the moment of death, and aspires to rise and meet it despite everything that is mysterious and unknowable about it.

Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), the man who acknowledges the moment of death for what it is, is cognizant enough to be at ease with it—in fact, comes most fully into life when he is most closely confronting death. The only problem is that Max survived what he thought would be his final minutes of life. He survived a devastating airplane crash that killed hundreds of other passengers, while he himself came away with only superficial scratches and bruises—and was literally capable of walking out of the wreckage on his own two feet, inexplicably okay. Perhaps even more okay than he had ever been.

From that moment on, Max's life passes by as if he were in a waking dream. In trying to understand and come to terms with what has happened to him, and how it will forever change him, he comes to a slow and constant realization that even if he isn't in immediate mortal danger, life itself—for all intents and purposes—is the ongoing moment of his death. His friends, family, and the strangers he encounters along the way struggle to understand what Max now sees so clearly, while Max is stifled in trying to make himself understood.

The trivial monotony of life and the busy-work we preoccupy ourselves with it, simply in order to kill time, no longer hold any power over Max. Things like self-censorship, little-white-lies, money problems or marital spats no longer make sense to him, as if they are all words of a foreign language that Max can't read or write in. Instead, his language is spoken in terms of love, grief, healing and what exists now, the present.

Walking away from the plane crash, Max is so calm, so at ease that the paramedics, firemen and policemen who try to control the chaos and put out the flames of the fire don't even recognize him as a survivor of the crash, and Max doesn't correct their mistakes. Yet as he returns back to his former life, his marriage, his son and his work after the crash, he realizes that surviving life itself, being incapable of unseeing what he has seen, coming back from where he has gone, is what may finally kill him.

Director Peter Weir has made the soul of explorers and adventurers his province, having made films such as The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Truman Show (1998) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). The protagonists of all these films are men who are trapped by things beyond their ability to control, and who struggle to release themselves from their bonds—sometimes that struggle is their undoing, sometimes it sets them free.

To say that Fearless is my number one favorite supernatural film is, admittedly, a bit of a cheat. Technically speaking, nothing 'supernatural' occurs. While Max surviving the airplane crash is miraculous, it isn't a miracle—and he would be the first one to acknowledge it for what it was; a coincidental happening. While Max discovers many truths about life and death, he never comes to any deeper understanding about what will happen to him, or anyone, after it ends—if anything. To be sure, nothing 'supernatural' occurs from start to finish in the film in terms of what we commonly acknowledge as supernatural events—yet, to say that is to suggest that there is nothing supernatural about life itself, or death. Even if nothing happens to us once life is finally over, isn't it still amazing that we were here, for a short while?

It seems that Max thinks so; and life after the crash, for him, is about living without fear—living totally and completely unafraid. To be truly fearless.

Fearless may not have the usual staples of most supernatural films, but it presents the mystery of death, and what is amazing about life, in a supernatural way.

There's a moment at the beginning of the film where Max is making his way back home after the plane crash. Yet, he's in no rush; he stops his car and sits in the dirt beside a tranquil highway to stare off into the distant landscape. He's alone with the world. He spits in the dirt, and turns the dirt into mud. I'm not dead, he might be thinking I'm alive. There's something supernatural about this fact, this realization, because—after what he has just been through, it's almost impossible to imagine. Yet here he is, all the same—turning dirt into mud.