This year’s Sydney Film Festival offered a strong field of films beyond Hollywood’s familiar moral economy, with strange melodramas, existential horror, childhood reverie, sporting tragedy and art-house pleasures among the standouts.

Each year, the Sydney Film Festival offers a chance to see many films from industries that have mostly avoided the banal moral economy of Hollywood in the 21st century. Here are my top five from the 2026 festival.

The Good Boy is a stunningly strange film from Polish director Jan Komasa. The narrative follows the kidnapping of 19-year-old chav Tommy (Anson Boon) by dysfunctional couple Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), who bring him back to live with them and their son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) in the British countryside.

They keep him chained up in the basement, torturing him as part of his retraining as “good”. Gradually, he acquires more freedom as he becomes an integral, trusted member of the family.

The grotesque, farcical energy of the opening dissipates with the film becoming, by the end, a kind of beautiful meditation on the sacrifices required to belong to a family. We become as integrated as Tommy into this deranged family, and end up loving it too.

This is enabled by all the great lead performances, including Riseborough as the anaemic matriarch, and Graham, brilliant as ever, as the father keen on replicating what he imagines to be a conventional family life.

Abel Korzeniowski’s score, which recalls a 1990s domestic thriller, is similarly masterful. The Good Boy is an arresting melodrama punctuated by some side-splittingly funny moments – a true masterpiece, and my pick for the best film of the festival.

Dawning, from writer-director Patrik Syversen, follows three sisters, Kristine (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen), Cecilie (Silje Storstein) and Esther (Marte Magnusdotter Solem) as they holiday in rural Norway following the attempted suicide of Kristine. They bicker with each other about things minor and not so minor, while Esther’s husband Even (Sigurd Myhre) does his best to keep the peace.

But things begin to unravel when a mysterious stranger (Thorbjørn Harr) shows up claiming to have car trouble, and proceeds to stalk and slash them one by one. The sisters’ attempts to evade the murderous figure are intercut with memories of earlier domestic events and footage of the characters........

© Pearls and Irritations