What to watch: The 3 best movies to stream this weekend from 'Halloween' to 'The Handmaiden'

Wondering what to watch? This week brings a more traditionally seasonal line-up of October films, more attuned to the spooky season.

Of course, what Halloween movie line-up would be complete without at least one movie from the Halloween franchise – so this week brings Halloween (2019), David Gordon Green’s soft reboot of John Carpenter’s iconic horror film.

It’s the start of a new trilogy — with much of the original cast returning — that continued with Halloween Kills, soon to be concluded with Halloween Ends (though as Michael Myers’s repeated returns from the dead have indicated, that it might actually end seems unlikely).

Read more: 10 under-appreciated horror movies to stream

Other works by horror maestros emerge, in the form of Dark Glasses, a new film by the Italian director Dario Argento, best known for his seminal giallo film Suspiria.

Meanwhile on MUBI, with their addition of his historical romance The Handmaiden, the site lays groundwork for the upcoming release of acclaimed Korean director Park Chan-wook’s latest film Decision to Leave.

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Halloween (2018) - BBC iPlayer (Pick of the week)

The term legacyquel has become increasingly useful in its utility over the past decade, referring to a specific kind of franchise film that simultaneously reboots and creates a late sequel to a beloved series while desperately trying to recapture what made the first instalment so popular.

It’s become so frequent as Hollywood studios lean hard into audience familiarity, as they try to compete with the all-consuming monolith of superhero movies, trying to use nostalgia as a weapon but also trying to trim any complications or contradictions that naturally develop in any franchise with a long life.

Read more: Jamie Lee Curtis bids goodbye to Halloween

Halloween (2018) might be a perfect example of this, as one-time American indie darling David Gordon Green throws out several decades of insane (and sometimes endearingly goofy) plotting in order to get to the “real” Halloween, winking at early twists through character’s speculation about what happened to Laurie Strode in Haddonfield in 1978.

Watch a trailer for Halloween

While it’s a shame that the film thinks itself above the goofy carnage of years past, by focusing the story back onto that one event, this Halloween sequel is a solid, back to basics approach – while it hardly reinvents the wheel, its cathartic face-off between Laurie (a returning Jamie Lee Curtis), the survivor of the original film, and her lifelong tormentor Michael Myers, is quite exciting to watch.

The script from Gordon-Green and McBride infuses proceedings with some comedy, often in the obnoxiousness or alarm of Myers’ victims, the first among them being smug true crime podcasters, latching to the bloody tragedy of Laurie and Michael’s past.

The smirking comedy might not be for everybody, but for those simply looking for some bloody, throwback slasher entertainment, Green certainly provides. And if you want to find out how this arc concludes, Halloween Ends is in cinemas now.

Also on iPlayer: Poltergeist (1982), Muppets Most Wanted (2014)

The Handmaiden (2016) - MUBI

Park Chan-wook’s films are perhaps best known for their dark comedy and mean ironies, to the point that it could be mistaken for nihilism. But in recent years the director’s films have become more romantic, especially his most recent feature The Handmaiden.

An adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith, now relocated to the pre-WWII Japanese occupation of Korea, Park’s film brings his giddy, lurid filmmaking into a more earnest story, one of hidden love and emancipation that feels a far cry away from the punishing fables of his past work. Not that it’s any less exciting to watch, any less tricky or any less explicit.

The story follows a multilayered plot, as Park constantly keeps the audience on their toes with each chapter of the film. The Handmaiden might be the most bravura example of his trademark sleight of hand, as the second act flies in the face of everything we knew about the first, the third act does this yet again.

It begins with a con man who plans to steal an heiress's heart, winning her fortune through duplicitous marriage. But things quickly go off the rails once the handmaiden he hires as part of his schemes falls in love with their target, and the film’s various schemes begin in earnest. Each new twist brings with it an entertainingly perverse theatre of the upper class, as power turns into boredom, which turns into perversion, which turns into violence.

Read more: Everything new on Sky and NOW in October

But, in contrast to a lot of his earlier work, The Handmaiden remains on the more sincere side, even as the truth of the relationships between each character is called into question. But even then, that emotion all feels stunningly real.

Watch a trailer for The Handmaiden

Also on MUBI: Tenebrae (1982)

Dark Glasses (2022) - Shudder

Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, king of the giallo and purveyor of sumptuous, sultry and scary imagery returns to the fold with Dark Glasses. It's a strange and moody mix of late style with classic formal elements of the directors work such as synth-heavy scores cranked up to eleven over hallucinatory, macabre imagery.

Read more: Everything new on Disney+ in October

A young escort named Diana crashes her car during a chase, as she flees a man trying to kill her, and loses her sight, while accidentally killing the family of a young boy named Chin (Andrea Zhang). Chin survives the accident and begins to act as her eyes, helping her in her fight against the obsessive killer.

Classic elements of Argento’s work are very much present but filtered through a softer approach, partially through the genuinely touching character drama between Diana and Chin, and its (relatively) reserved style.

An imperfect return, but an exciting one to see.

Also on Shudder: She Will (2022)