Don’t you love films that feel like a glorious fuck you to cinema and its rules? With this week’s release of Lynne Ramsay’s wild, revisionist neo-noir thriller You Were Never Really Here, it’s high time to introduce the misbehaving cheerleaders of Post-bro filmmaking.

What is Post-bro? It’s a movement redefining cinema through a boss-A attitude, meta digs at archaic film dudes, creative jabs at out-dated film critics, and unapologetic movies that will make any close-minded film guy’s boner shrink.

Post-bro films are rare, but when they land they make a splash. Take Sofia Coppola’s recent remix of Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled; it won her a historic directing prize at Cannes last year, where she became only the second woman at the festival to win the award for directing. Last month, Canberra filmmaker Cate Shortland, known for her female-driven festival faves, signed on to direct Marvel’s highly anticipated Black Widow film, roughly a year after Patty Jenkins destroyed the box office with Wonder Woman

What we’re actually seeing here are familiar narratives being put through an eco-feminine juicer: filmmakers making rebellious, quasi-arthouse blends out of well-known stories in an attempt to snap us out of film boredom.

Please see 'You Were Never Really Here' if you still haven't. It's still my favorite film of the year, and it is absolutely brilliant. We don't talk about it enough. I think it deserves much more attention.

— Jeffrey Rex (@ImJeffreyRex) September 9, 2018

Who Are Post-Bro Filmmakers?

Since the 1950s film critics have found ways to discriminate against non-male directors.

Usually, film critics use the descriptor ‘auteur’ to champion bro filmmakers. The word auteur is French for “let’s congratulate male filmmakers who claim full glory in a collaborative space”. Check the Wikipedia entry for auteur and count how many filmmakers on there aren’t dudes. It’ll take you a couple of seconds.

Post-bro filmmakers aren’t seen as auteurs because they’re often queer or female.

So, who are they, really? They’re alt-creative survivors of cinema’s bro-literati, filmmakers who make their own eclectic films, on their own terms. Kathryn Bigelow, the first-ever female winner of the Best Director Oscar? Post-Bro. Ava DuVernay, director of A Wrinkle in Time, a children’s-fantasy blockbuster starring Oprah Winfrey? Post-Bro. Claire Denis, the genius director behind the forthcoming French arthouse sci-fi film starring Twilight alumn Robert Pattinson and André 3000? Post-Bro. Ana Lily Amirpour, creator of the first Iranian vampire western in Persian?

Yep, you get the idea.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is a slow-burner for sure but with Lynne Ramsay writing and directing, and Joaquin Phoenix delivering a quite brilliant lead performance, it's a slow-burner that you simply can't take your eyes off. pic.twitter.com/dvabi2Wx0A

— Josh Barton (@bartonj2410) September 4, 2018

It’s 2018 And Film Is Changing

It’s taken till 2018 to be able to find the perfect time to spotlight Post-bro filmmaking.  Audiences are making it clear they no longer crave male filmmakers lazily recycling what they love about their film “heroes” (can someone tell Wes Anderson to chill?).

Post-Bro provocations have crept up on us recently, with the apparently outrageous all-female-led reboot of Ghostbusters (2016), eventually leading into a whole year where Hollywood failed to properly support non-male directed films, culminating in the TV series Bates Motel casting Rihanna to update the most iconic scene in movie history —  the famous shower scene of Psycho (1960). Is she even knifed like Janet Leigh? No! Because Post-Bro filmmaking doesn’t give a fuck.

These filmmakers don’t remake films — they fix them.

This has been a standout year for women-directed book adaptations. You Were Never Really Here, A Wrinkle in Time, Miseducation of Cameron Post… the list goes on.

If you could pair any woman or non-binary director with a book what would you choose?

— I ♥ Female Directors (@iheartdirectors) September 7, 2018

Australia boasts a few Post-bro filmmakers too, like Jennifer Kent and Soda_Jerk, who are the most genre-fucking screen vigilantes of our time. Their films respectively bring new meanings to the possessed demon trope (seen in 2014’s The Babadook) and bombastic feminist cheerleading (seen in 2018’s TERROR NULLIUS).

Remember how The Exorcist director William Friedkin claimed The Babadook was the scariest film he’s ever seen? And who doesn’t want to watch a punk retelling of Australian film history? Even Australian cinema wants to give cinema a do-over.

Psycho With A Makeover

Lynne Ramsay’s new film, You Were Never Really Here is one of most jaw-dropping feats of Post-bro filmmaking.

Having emerged from a sexist blacklisting — Ramsay famously bailed on directing 2013’s ill-fated Natalie Portman western Jane Got A Gun, and got shredded by the industry for it — her comeback film set fire to the thriller genre by shitting over male auteurs’ perceived stronghold.

Like Rihanna’s Bates Motel reversal, You Were Never Really Here swings a punch at Hitchcock. Joaquin Phoenix plays a vicious murderer who lives with his ageing mother, and I know what you’re thinking: is this just a modern Psycho? In one scene, Phoenix comes home to actually find his mother asleep in front of Psycho on TV — cue Phoenix ‘fake’ stabbing her before they both laugh in a cute moment.

Phoenix’s character could be a perfect product of every Hitchcock-ian damaged man, but Ramsay swipes left on the ‘old master’. Her film is Psycho with a makeover.

Instead of doing neat and tidy Hitchcock, Ramsay goes HARD with R-rated violence, a noisy score, no romantic sub-plot, focusing on a guy with severe PTSD trying to save a young girl from an illegal sex ring. Film critics compare her film to other classics like Taxi Driver — and while it could have ended up a contemporary Psycho ‘redo’ about yet another tortured man, Ramsay goes and shakes it the fuck up. Her referencing Psycho early in the film is her way of taking the bro-code and making it the no-code, because Ramsay plays with audience expectations, encouraging her non-conformity.

She doesn’t add to the exhaustive bunch of Hitchcock rip offs. She knows we expected her silence, so her response was a loud comeback movie that is anything but an homage.

Ramsay’s new film is a perfect entry point into the experience of Post-bro filmmakers. Her sexist industry-blacklisting, back-door exit from Hollywood and six-year hiatus have resulted in You Were Never Really Here, which feels like a well-deserved slay of cinema. The film pulsates with Ramsay’s frustrating anger in a subversive Post-bro rollercoaster ride.

Farewell, Grandpa Cinema

Post-Bro filmmakers have an attitude that is both a hug and a “fuck you” to making cinema.

They’re huge cinephiles, sure — they just have different takes on what constitutes celebrated work, and their own future. Post-bro filmmaking is about letting new, iconic images rise up out of the wreckage of Grandpa Cinema.

Is it too much to ask everyone to forget our male-dominated history? Maybe. But this shift in cinema feels like it’s at least arrived as a reward for all the mansplaining we’ve had to endure over what feels like a century of bro-film discourse. We can’t delete our film past, but we can start reshaping it.

That’s why Post-bro filmmaking is so exciting: because it has the potential to transform outdated film into something better. With the added bonus of Rihanna.

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André Shannon is a Sydney based film critic, and one half of filmmaking collective AUSTRALIAN REFLEXXX. You can catch him talking cinema with Jack Jen Atherton at 10:10 am on Mornings with Bridie Tanner on FBi 94.5, or on the podcast Cinema Girls.