There was a time—not long ago—when the action genre was straightforward: guns, explosions, a grizzled man growling about injustice. Then, quietly at first, things began to change. Gunfights got slower. Dialogue got sparser. Entire city blocks would explode in the background while the camera lingered on a moth trapped in a teacup. And from this absurd, majestic collision of pretension and pyrotechnics, a new genre emerged: Arthouse-Action.
At its heart, Arthouse-Action is the cinematic equivalent of watching a monk duel with an embittered cop in a field of wheat for reasons that are never fully explained—and loving every minute of it.
Origins of Arthouse-Action
Scholars trace the birth of Arthouse-Action to a 2019 screening of Fast & Furious 46 that was accidentally projected over a silent screening of Gune Spobor’s A Brief Sadness in Springtime. Audiences wept, confused and exhilarated, as Vin Diesel drove a flaming muscle car across a Hungarian plain in real time. Within weeks, aspiring filmmakers had taken to their iPhones, filming kung fu fights inside abandoned libraries to the sound of Gregorian chant.
But it was 2022’s Spleen Protocol by Luxembourgian-Cuban director ÉmileCantrille that formally announced the arrival of the Arthouse-Action genre. The plot? A mute assassin must defeat a sentient bureaucracy to retrieve his stolen identity documents, all while experiencing the four stages of grief in reverse order. The climactic gun battle in an empty IKEA showroom, scored to a 12-minute organ fugue, is now the stuff of legend.
Defining Features: Violence as Vocabulary
Arthouse-Action films reject the simplicity of traditional storytelling. Some of the tropes of the genre include:
• The Melancholy Gun: Weapons are often symbolic. A rifle might represent rural guilt. A grenade might be filled with rose petals. In The Noose That Reloads (2024, dir. Fernanda Lübeck), the protagonist only feels able to fire his weapon when reciting Portuguese poetry.
• The Long, Unblinking Take: The longer the better. Knife Weather (2023, dir. Theo Jankowski) features a 43-minute knife fight in a parking garage, filmed entirely in a single dolly shot. Neither character speaks. One cries gently. The other occasionally vomits.
• Unclear Motivation: Why are we chasing this briefcase? Why are we hanging upside down from a helicopter made of stained glass? We may never know. And that’s the point.
• Dialogue That Might Be Metaphor
For example, this exchange from Murder whilst watching Fellini:
“Did you kill him?”
“Only the part of him that believed in architecture.”
• Absurd Settings: Action scenes often occur in incongruous or meaningless locations: post-apocalyptic puppet theaters, underwater bus depots, art installations that are also landmines.
The Directors: Mad Geniuses or Elaborate Hoaxes?
Émile Cantrille (Spleen Protocol, Bullets for Moths) – A former entomologist who has never knowingly spoken English and claims to direct all his films in a trance state induced by barley tea.
Fernanda Lübeck (The Noose That Reloads, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun) – Known for insisting her actors live together in silence for 40 days before shooting.
Jian-Baptiste Sorgue (Static Fire, Fluid Priest) – Described by Cahiers du Cinéma as “the heir to Tarkovsky, if Tarkovsky were into Muay Thai and recursive dream logic.”
Claire Unit (Exit Wounds for Beginners) – Once edited a 2-hour shootout using only footage of the actors blinking. The violence is implied.
Rodney Thistle III (Krakatoa: The Musical) – A failed aristocrat turned filmmaker who insists all fight choreography must be based on 19th-century fencing manuals and mime.
Canonical Films
• Spleen Protocol (2022, dir. Émile Cantrille)
A mute bureaucrat battles an invisible tax agency. The final fight takes place inside a malfunctioning photocopier.
• The Noose That Reloads (2024, dir. Fernanda Lübeck)
Set in a future where all emotions are illegal, a disgraced wedding planner becomes a mercenary, powered by her grief.
• Knife Weather (2023, dir. Theo Jankowski)
Two men fight in a garage while a voiceover debates the morality of imported oranges.
• Exit Wounds for Beginners (2025, dir. Claire Unit)
A sniper contemplates his absentee father while eliminating targets across five continents, none of whom appear on screen.
• Glass Lung (2025, dir. Rodney Thistle III)
An ex-monk-turned-hitman falls in love with a foghorn. Contains no human dialogue and three operatic gunfights performed entirely in semaphore.
The Future: Bigger, Slower, Stranger
Coming soon:
• Chairblood (2026, dir. Dawa Hung) – A surreal thriller in which an office chair gains sentience and exacts revenge on corrupt corporate executives. Violence levels are said to be off the scale.
• The Night is a Gun in a Tuxedo (2026, dir. Alain Pfitzner) – A tuxedo-clad, anthropomorphic Pygmy goat solves crimes by trotting slowly through cities that no longer exist. Full of stunts. Unfortunately several goats were harmed making this film.
• Scarf Protocol (TBA, dir. anonymous) – A rumored 7-hour film in which a single scarf is passed between enemies during a global ceasefire. No script, no cast, no cameras—only shots of the scarf.
Final Thoughts
Arthouse-Action teeters on the edge of absurdity, impossibility and sincerity. It is a genre that dares to ask: What if a car chase could make you cry? What if an explosion could reveal the futility of language? What if the villain is actually your subconscious fear of intimacy, disguised as a man wearing two eyepatches?
It may not always make sense—but then again, neither does life. And in the end, what is cinema, if not a slow-motion dive through the flaming window of the soul?
“You don’t shoot a man because he wronged you,” as the protagonist of Knife Weather says. “You shoot him because the silence won’t end itself.”
That my friends is the crux of Arthouse-Action, one of the fastest growing genres of film in the Western world.
