Perfume Genius’s Top10

I love this movie. I first watched it right before I started making music, and I actually credit it with giving me the courage to sing. Lili Taylor plays folk songs, and she has a really natural and beautiful voice, but it’s unconventional and singular. The songs are simple, but I was so moved by them, and what I was responding to made me think that maybe I could do that as well.

Dogfight has a perfect, understated ending. It isn’t quite romantic, but it’s essentially a warm and tender embrace, and it shows an understanding between the two characters that feels very human and sweet.

I grew up in Seattle, and my babysitter actually played Ronette Pulaski in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. So, despite being way too young, I was allowed to watch the show. I think seeing that changed my life; even now, when I hear the first few notes of the score, I’m instantly taken back to when I first heard it.

I saw Lost Highway in the theater with my dad when I was about fifteen. He didn’t like it, and I felt embarrassed by how much I did. I told him that it wasn’t for me, but then I went home and downloaded the script on my dial-up modem and got the soundtrack . . . I was obsessed.

I loved the combination of all its parts. Some of it is very funny, while some of it is incredibly terrifying; it’s at times very difficult to understand but then very transparent; it’s both sexy and gross. It’s all of these things at once, which also makes it very dreamlike. I hadn’t seen a film that allowed all of these elements to exist at the same time.

There’s an undercurrent in Lost Highway that has always scared me, but I’m also attracted to that. I like those two things coexisting.

I’ve seen this movie more than any other. It’s really powerful, and I love that everyone I know has also seen it. Its imagery is iconic. It’s not obscure, and yet it has things in it that feel subversive.

Thelma and Louise have such a specific strength to them that I hadn’t seen before on-screen. Their friendship is sort of queer-coded. It’s a romantic friendship that shows how close two people can be in a way that defies rules.

The first time I heard about Breaking the Waves was when Emily Watson was nominated for an Oscar and they played a clip from it at the ceremony. I remember instantly thinking I needed to see the movie. But I was young, so I didn’t until much later. When I did finally watch it, I was hysterical. It was deeply moving to me.

I watched it with a friend who didn’t like it or understand why I was crying, which I think only heightened the experience. For me, watching movies is often a visceral experience, but it all depends on how you go into it. I went into watching this so earnestly and with an open heart.

Emily Watson is unbelievably good in it. There’s one scene where she looks directly at the camera that has always stayed with me. She really carries the movie. I think my friend didn’t understand her character’s motivations or thought she was simple or stupid—but that wasn’t my read at all. I thought she was a pure soul willing to love hard and do anything for her love. The intensity of that kind of emotion can be frightening but also so cathartic. I’m scared of that much big feeling in my own life, but in a movie I can connect to it almost instantaneously.

Something I love about Isabelle Huppert is that you can feel so much intensity from her even when she’s completely still. She does this a lot, where she’s not in motion but you can still feel this wild internal world swirling inside her. I love The Piano Teacher because, depending on my mood, it can be funny or horrifying—and you’re not told how to feel about any of it.

As much as I love intense feelings, I also like when things are clinical and bleak, as they often are in Michael Haneke’s movies. Everything or nothing—those two extremes feel very similar to me. Everything matters or nothing does.

My favorite thing in a movie is to be consistently surprised, and, in The Piano Teacher, Huppert’s reactions to everything are always unexpected. It feels very free.

You’re never really prepared for The Vanishing. It’s a brutal movie, and you’re left thinking about it for a very long time after you watch it. It almost seasons your worldview for a little bit.

It’s a horror movie but without gore or supernatural elements, so it makes you feel like this situation is something that could really just happen.

With my own work, it’s often hard to articulate why certain things just feel right to me. I’ll be in the studio making a beautiful song and then suddenly want a chainsaw noise to cut through it. And when I see that kind of tonal shift in a movie and things just unravel without explanation, I love it.

Terence Stamp is so beautiful in this movie. Supernaturally beautiful, really. I feel like if he had come to our house, my whole family would have been obsessed with him too.

It’s a very physical movie. Everyone is driven by pure instinct all the time, and the way they move and run is very dancelike—it almost feels like choreography. I love the scene when Stamp sits on the bed and puts the dad’s legs over his shoulders while the daughter is watching. When I was conceiving of one of the videos for my new record, I wanted to evoke this energy, and then I ended up just reenacting this scene.

The family’s obsession with the main character—I just love that. It feels very gay but in an off way . . . I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s beyond logic.

It’s easy to make something that shocks you for a minute or even a day, but it’s harder to make something that truly shocks you and stays in your mind. This movie has some shocking things that have stuck with me. I’ve used it as a reference for much of the artwork on my new album.

There’s a scene where a cop is comforting his friend who has just confessed to a murder. He’s consoling him, and then all of a sudden they just start making out. I remember feeling stunned by that. I was uncertain how to unpack that, but I was also happy to just enjoy the surprise of it.

L’humanité is the kind of movie that I like to watch because I want to see what’s inside of it. I want to get to the end and be taken somewhere bleak and see if there’s hope or a soul in it or if it’s just empty and icky. Maybe it’s both of those things. But sometimes it’s just fun to get off on bad shit and enjoy something fucked up or twisted, especially if you’re someone who tries to be good all the time. It can be exciting to have things not make sense and be disgusting.

I just saw Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, which reminded me of how much I like Secrets & Lies. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is so good in both.

There’s a freedom to this movie. It’s so natural, and you have the feeling that all the characters are just living and going about their lives in front of you. But then Leigh has a way of heightening reality as well; there are moments that are very funny, and then something devastating and heartbreaking happens. But it never feels overblown. Nothing feels calculated or designed to manipulate your emotions. It’s just unfolding because that’s how life is.

I associate The Celebration with a time when I was growing up and discovering movies in a broader way. I would rollerblade to the video store and they’d let me rent R-rated movies, and I’d watch them in my basement.

It’s another one on this list that’s sometimes funny and sometimes horrifying. It was also a visual reference for my album, in terms of its energy and the way it was shot—especially in the dinner scenes, which are chaotic and have all these jump cuts to people laughing and spilling things.

If you’re going to watch this with other people, they need to be along for the ride, because it’s a slow build to a strong payoff—and it’s so truly fucked up. It’s hard to make a movie like this, one that is about something that would be so disturbing no matter how the story is told. But Thomas Vinterberg does this in a way that’s so multilayered and deep. I love it.