A beginner's guide to A24, for people who bounced off it

A24 has acquired an unusual thing for a distributor: a personality. It has also acquired a reputation for slow, oblique, faintly punishing films, which is unfair to a catalogue that includes broad comedies, crowd-pleasing thrillers and at least one genuine four-quadrant hit.

The reputation mostly comes from people starting with the most demanding titles.

If you want to know what the fuss is about

Start with something that has a strong narrative engine. Ex Machina is a three-hander with a clear question and a tightening structure. It is unmistakably an A24 film in look and temperature, but it never asks you to wait.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the other obvious entry point, and it is genuinely a comedy first, whatever its reputation for maximalism suggests.

If you want the horror

The label's horror output is where its reputation for slowness is most earned, and also where the payoff is largest. Hereditary is the strongest of them and the least forgiving; it is a family drama that becomes something else, and it requires patience for roughly forty minutes before it collects.

If that sounds like too much, The Witch is shorter and more contained, though the period dialogue is a genuine barrier for some viewers. Subtitles help more than people expect.

If you bounced off before

The usual failure mode is starting with a film built on atmosphere rather than plot and concluding that the whole catalogue is like that. It is not. Try one with a clear structural spine before deciding.

What connects them

There is no house style, despite the meme. What the better titles share is a willingness to let a scene run past the point where a studio note would cut it, and a preference for endings that resolve emotionally rather than narratively. If that sounds appealing, you will like a lot of these. If it sounds irritating, the label is probably not for you, and that is a legitimate conclusion.