Glasgow Film Festival 2025: Ten Films to See

Ahead of the 2025 edition of Scotland's biggest film festival, our film editor picks out some highlights from the Glasgow Film Festival programme

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 31 Jan 2025
  • Glasgow Film Festival 2025

Scanning this year’s GFF lineup, it’s notably lighter on the big-name arthouse auteurs that usually pepper the festival's programme. There are a few notable exceptions like The End, a curious-sounding apocalyptic musical from Joshua Oppenheimer starring Tilda Swinton, George MacKay and Michael Shannon, or world premiere Tornado, the hugely anticipated new film from Scottish director John Maclean (Slow West), which is opening the festival and should kick it off with a mighty wallop. I've gone digging around the rest of the programme and here are ten of the most promising-looking titles that have caught my eye. 

On Falling

Laura Carreira’s riveting drama about a young Portuguese woman working in an Amazon-like fulfilment centre in Edinburgh makes its Scottish debut after wowing audiences and winning prizes at festivals across the world. A clear-eyed, deeply humanistic film about how easy it is to get stuck in a spiral of everyday capitalist exploitation, it’ll make you reconsider ever making a convenient online purchase again. 28 Feb & 1 Mar

Went Up the Hill

Australian film director Samuel Van Grinsven impressed with his sexy and deeply atmospheric 2019 debut Sequin in a Blue Room, which mixed queer desire with a nail-biting techno-thriller plot. This follow-up, a poetic ghost story centred on the relationship that forms between a grieving woman and her dead wife's estranged son, looks similarly intriguing. Stranger Things' hunk Dacre Montgomery and the brilliant Vicky Krieps star. 8 & 9 Mar

Peacock

This debut from Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wenger got rave reviews when it premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival. A quirky satire concerned with the way we curate our personalities in the modern world, the film centres on Matthais (Albrecht Schuch), who works as a companion for hire, and while he’s great at being the perfect person for others, he’s kind of forgotten how to be his authentic self. Early reviews have compared Peacock to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos and Ruben Östlund. 2 & 3 Mar

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Jessica Lange has made a career playing women on the edge of a nervous breakdown, so she’s perfectly cast as Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted matriarch of the dysfunctional family in Eugene O'Neill's 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Also don’t miss the chance to see Lange at her special In Conversation event (1 Mar) where she'll discuss her glittering Hollywood career, which took her from King Kong to American Horror Story via Tootsie, Cape Fear and Rob Roy. 28 Feb

Motel Destino

If you’re in the mood for something steamy, look no further than this pulpy, neon-lit gem from Brazil. Set mostly within the sweaty confines of a seedy roadside motel, it’s reportedly a feverish and wildly uninhibited erotic thriller filled with sexy people getting up to no good. 28 Feb & 1 Mar

Boys Go to Jupiter

This gloriously leftfield coming-of-age animation follows a Floridian teenager who’s trying to earn five grand during the dreamy twilight zone between Christmas and New Year, but his hustle is interrupted when a gelatinous alien makes his acquaintance. 4 & 5 Mar

U Are the Universe

I love the sound of this Ukrainian sci-fi about a space trucker taking a shipment of waste to Jupiter accompanied by his joke-telling robot. All is going well until he learns that the Earth exploded while he was on the job, leaving him possibly the only person alive in the solar system. Existential hijinks ensue. 4 & 5 Mar

Restless

If you’ve ever had a noisy neighbour then you’ll likely get a kick (or potentially be triggered) by Jed Hart’s thriller Restless. The film centres on Nicky, a mild-mannered, middle-aged care worker who starts to channel a more primal side when she’s driven to sleep-deprived distraction by her obnoxious new neighbour who parties into the wee hours. This darkly humorous bout of psychological warfare is reportedly a hoot. 5 & 6 Mar

Ghostlight

The power of art to act as a balm for heartbreak is at the centre of this family drama that’s repeatedly left audiences in puddles of their own tears across the US. It centres on a grumpy labourer with a hot temper and a family in turmoil, who finds a surprising creative outlet when he joins an amateur dramatics group putting on Romeo and Juliet. 27 & 28 Feb

The Girls (1968)

GFF can always be relied upon for great retrospectives, so be sure to make some time in your schedule for the strand dedicated to the films of Swedish-born actor and director Mai Zetterling. The Girls, Zetterling's fierce, playful and often surreal feminist fable starring three legendary Swedish actresses (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom) is a great place to start. 5 Mar


The 21st Glasgow Film Festival runs 26 Feb to 9 Mar; full programme at glasgowfilm.org