Recent dark comedies: a ten-day shoot was filmed again in Turkey

A dark comedy finds the joke in the subjects people are told to keep quiet about: death, crime, war, grief. The tone never settles. A scene can be funny and awful at the same time, and the genre can tilt toward horror, thriller or surrealism without losing the laugh.

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a comedy about nuclear annihilation, is the landmark critics usually cite. Audiences have also shown they will follow a darkly comic story across languages: on 9 February 2020, Parasite, a South Korean class satire, became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Most of the films below were made far from Hollywood, in Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Iceland, Finland and Switzerland, and several were made on very little money. Relay lists 26 dark comedies dated 2015 onward that passed review. These are the ones with the strangest stories behind them. Years below are first release years, and Relay's own dates run later for some. Two, The 100 Year Old Man and Of Horses and Men, are 2013 films that Relay lists as 2015.

What makes a dark comedy

• A grim subject, played for laughs. A death in the family, a nursing home escape, a heist gone wrong.
• The humour is never comfortable. The laugh arrives a second before the discomfort does.
• Independence gives it room. Several of these were made on friends' money, in friends' houses.

Recent dark comedies to watch

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2013)

Allan Karlsson turns 100 in a nursing home, climbs out of the window and sets off on a journey nobody planned. The film is based on the 2009 debut novel by Jonas Jonasson, a Swedish journalist, and that book was the best-selling title in Sweden in 2010. The film opened in Sweden on 25 December 2013 and grossed more than $50 million worldwide on a budget of about $9.6 million.

Its biggest honour was an Oscar nomination. At the ceremony held in 2016, the makeup artists Love Larson and Eva von Bahr were nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, for ageing the lead actor all the way to 100. Von Bahr said the whole story would collapse if the makeup did not work. A sequel followed in 2016.

Action/Adventure

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The Coffee Table (2022)

The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor) is a Spanish film by Caye Casas about a couple with a new baby who buy a coffee table, a decision that changes their lives. Casas shot it in ten days at a house a friend let him use, with no money or backing. He pitched it as an uncomfortable, politically incorrect story with extremely black humour and a brutal tragedy.

It premiered in 2022 at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and won Best Film in the White Raven competition at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in 2023. In May 2024 the novelist Stephen King praised it publicly and called it horribly funny. A Turkish remake directed by Can Evrenol, Cam Sehpa, reportedly finished filming in February 2025.

Horror

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Checkered Ninja (2018)

Anders Matthesen is a Danish comedian and actor who wrote a debut novel in 2016 about a boy named Aske. Aske gets a Ninja doll from his uncle after a trip to Thailand. The doll is alive and helps with trouble at school, but it is possessed and wants revenge. Matthesen turned it into an animated film, which opened in Denmark on 25 December 2018.

It sold 345,947 tickets in its first eight days, a record opening week for a Danish film, and had the best opening ever for an animated feature in Danish cinemas, studio films included. After ten weeks it had sold more than 900,000 tickets. Checkered Ninja 2 followed in 2021, and a third film opened in Denmark in 2025.

Action/Adventure

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Fremont (2023)

Donya is an Afghan woman who once worked as a translator. She lives in Fremont, California, and works at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Director Babak Jalali found his lead through an open casting call on social media and Afghan community centres. Anaita Wali Zada was 22, had left Afghanistan on an evacuation flight and had never acted. Jalali said her own story closely paralleled Donya's, so the script did not change.

The factory was the idea of his co-writer Carolina Cavalli, after they toured a Chinatown factory. Jalali chose black and white late, just before pre-production, so the factory and the cities would look equal and timeless. He says he learned while making an earlier film that Fremont has the largest Afghan population in North America. The film premiered in the NEXT section of Sundance on 20 January 2023.

Drama

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Of Horses and Men (2013)

Of Horses and Men (Hross i oss) is an Icelandic film of connected stories about a rural horse community, told partly through the horses' point of view. It is darkly comic, and Iceland entered it for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. It was not nominated.

Benedikt Erlingsson, the director, says he grew up in central Reykjavik and was sent as a teenager to work summers on a horse farm. He calls the film very personal. He says the horses' welfare mattered: trainers worked on set and a vet was always present. In 2014 it won the Nordic Council Film Prize, whose jury called it rooted in the laconic humour of the Icelandic sagas, and the audience award at the Tromso International Film Festival.

Comedy

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Sew Torn (2024)

Freddy Macdonald's first feature began as a six-minute short of the same name, made in 2019 as his application to the American Film Institute. Searchlight Pictures acquired the short and it played in cinemas before Ready or Not. The director Joel Coen saw it and, in Macdonald's account, told him to turn it into a feature and use the Blood Simple method: go to friends, family and dentists to raise the money independently.

The feature follows Barbara, a seamstress who finds two wounded bikers, a gun and a briefcase. Her thread contraptions are practical effects, which Macdonald and his father tested in their backyard with cardboard guns. Eve Connolly, who plays her, had never sewn before. It was filmed in fall 2022 in Switzerland and premiered at South by Southwest on 11 March 2024. Variety headlined its review "A Loopy Crime Comedy."

Thriller

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Heavier Trip (2024)

Impaled Rektum is a fictional Finnish death metal band, invented in a film school mockumentary short that Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren expanded into the 2018 feature Heavy Trip. Laatio says that film flopped at first in Finland and blames poor marketing to the wrong audience. It then built a cult following, and in Japan, Laatio says, fans dress as its characters. The sequel arrived in 2024.

In Heavier Trip the band is in jail when it is offered a slot at Germany's Wacken Open Air. It turns the offer down, then breaks out when the guitarist's family home and slaughterhouse face demolition. The crew filmed at the real Wacken in 2023, an epic mud bath in Blabbermouth's words. Laatio says the directors scouted it a year earlier, the festival was sold in between, and the crew carried their gear through the mud because they could not use cars. Funding came from five countries: Finland, Lithuania, Germany, Belgium and Bulgaria.

Comedy

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Where to go next

• Cult classic movies that found their audience years late
• So bad it's good movies