‘Room’ and ‘Frank’ Director Lenny Abrahamson’s 10 Favorite Films

The best-known films of director Lenny Abrahamson, Frank and the quadruple Oscar-nominee Room, follow sad, and in some cases, broken souls as they search and fight for even the tiniest glimpse of happiness. Frank follows a band with an intentionally unpronounceable name, whose lead singer (Michael Fassbender) always wears a fake plastic head, concealing his scarred face from the world. In Room, a mother (Brie Larson) and her young son (Jacob Tremblay) survive a tragic fate, held prisoner in a single room for years on end.

The two films share an acute sensitivity to the lives of characters who struggle to make the best of the often brutal fates with which they’ve been burdened. Abrahamson listed the following ten films as his favorite in 2012’s Sight and Sound poll, a brilliant mixture of stories which as he laments in his quote, could have contained far more than a mere ten selections.

I found this a very tough exercise and there was much soul-searching. I could easily have put in another two each for Bresson and Tarkovsky, it felt like betrayal to leave out several of Kieslowski’s and a couple of Fellini’s (La Strada in particular which had a big effect on my development as a filmmaker), and there are some more recent films which perhaps would be on the list if I’d had more time to live with them. I’m glad to be able to include a title from Bill Douglas’s autobiographical trilogy which I’ve discovered only in the last few years but which I keep going back to. Taken together, these three films are an immense aesthetic and moral achievement and deserve to be much better known.

Check out the trailers for the ten films (or in the cases of The Match Factory Girl and My Childhood, the entire films) below.

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)