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Filmmakers Jessica Hausner and Alice Rohrwacher are, without a doubt, two of the most mercurial, singular voices in European cinema right now. Though she garnered attention for her teen psycho-thriller Lovely Rita in 2001, Hausner, who is Austrian, really made waves with Little Joe (2019), a gorgeously stylized, vaguely sci-fi drama about a killer plant. Little Joe was difficult to engage with, but viewers willing to follow its meticulousness down a rabbit hole were rewarded with a creative dystopian worldview and cautionary tale. Similarly, the Italian Rohrwacher announced herself with The Wonders (2014), a coming-of-age story set in a honey farm, but really leaped onto the global cinema radar with Happy as Lazzaro (2018), an exploration of contemporary society, vanishing traditions, corruption and the false promise of the social contract. Hausner and Rohrwacher are remarkable not just for their sensitive filmmaking but also for forging their own visual languages and defying accepted marketing logic.

In Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, a preternaturally gifted British tomb-raiding archeologist, Arthur (Josh O’Connor, Challengers), gets out of an Italian prison and reunites with his old gang in Tuscany for more treasure hunting. As he does this, he wrestles with the idea of living with the ghost of his presumed-dead girlfriend as opposed to having a new life with an opera student, Italia (Carol Duarte). Hausner’s Club Zero sees the unconventional teacher Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska, Bergman Island) join an elite boarding school to launch a class on “conscious eating” and quickly finds herself the leader of a dangerously devoted clutch of students who push back when their parents, and the school, try to rein in Novak’s increasingly cultish teachings.