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Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid)

It’s always interesting, at the beginning of any Nadav Lapid film, to note the myriad Israeli institutions that have backed the project. Since Emile’s Girlfriend (2006), Lapid’s work has sought to make sense of Israeli society—his criticisms a byproduct of attempting to articulate the confusion and warring arguments in his own head. Having won Berlin’s Golden Bear with Synonyms in 2019, Lapid could claim to be the most renowned Israeli filmmaker of his generation. That his work is at risk of falling afoul of that same state speaks volumes about the country’s ever-increasing authoritarianism as a whole. Further confirmation of that renown came with news that his latest would compete for the Palme...

A house can be haunted by many things. Ghosts, spirits of the past, specific moments replaying themselves again and again. A home can also be haunted by something more complex, like the shadow of a collective past. A generational trauma that is unable to rest because the wounds have never fully healed.

That is the nature of the entity haunting the story of Good Madam. A South African film written and directed by Jenna Cato Bass, it tells the story of a family and a culture that have not fully broken free from the past. After a fight with her extended family over her late grandmother’s estate, Tsidi (Chumisa Cosa) is forced to move in with her estranged mother, Mavis (Nosipho Mtebe). Mavis works as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy white woman in the suburbs of Cape Town. Tsidi is less than thrilled to be making the move,...

A young woman and her daughter are forced to hide in the creepy house where her mother is the devoted maid to an infirm old white woman

South African writer and film-maker Jenna Cato Bass has created an eerie, unsettling movie with something of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: its whispers and susurrations are the sound effects of a bad dream and it straddles the genres of supernatural thriller, satire and political parable.

Chumisa Cosa plays Tsidi, a young black woman in Cape Town who is estranged from Luthando (Khanyiso Kenqa), the father of her little girl Winnie (Kamvelethu Jonas Raziya). Some fierce arguments in Tsidi’s extended family mean that Tsidi and Winnie are effectively homeless and have to move in with Tsidi’s elderly mother Mavis (Nosipho Mtebe), the devoted maid and live-in nurse to a wealthy old white woman called Diane, who is catatonic and bedridden.

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Good Madam: "Shudder, AMC Networks’ premium streaming service for horror, thrillers and the supernatural, is thrilled to release the first trailer for the Shudder Original Good Madam ahead of the film’s debut on the platform on Thursday, July 14. The film is the fourth feature from celebrated South African writer/director Jenna Cato Bass and world premiered to high praise at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.

In Good Madam, Tsidi, a single mother, is forced to move in with her estranged mother Mavis, a live-in domestic worker caring obsessively for her catatonic white ‘Madam’ in an affluent Cape Town suburb. As Tsidi tries to heal her family however, a sinister specter begins to stir.

A genre film entrenched in the ordinary everyday horrors in our society, Good Madam explores the generational trauma inherent to South African culture, sprawling from the past to the present day, with chilling delivery and haunting results.

"Don't ever go in Madam's room." Shudder has revealed an official US trailer for Good Madam, a thriller from South Africa that originally premiered at the 2021 Toronto Film Festival last fall. After playing at other fests including Fantastic Fest & AFI Fest, Shudder will be streaming this one in July. Residues of apartheid-era domestic servitude confront legacies of colonial land theft in South African auteur Jenna Cato Bass’s daring horror-satire. Tsidi, a single mother, is forced to move in with her estranged mother Mavis, a live-in domestic worker caring obsessively for her catatonic white "Madam". As Tsidi tries to heal her family, a sinister spectre begins to stir. Starring Chumisa Cosa as Tsidi, along with Nosipho Mtebe, Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya, Sanda Shandu, Khanyiso Kenqa, Chris Gxalaba, Sizwe Ginger Lubengu, and Siya Sikawuti. Reviews say the film as "a masterclass in how horror can speak to race and inequality," where servitude is "a terrifying,...

As a supporting sponsor of The Overlook Film Festival, we're proud to present a 100th anniversary screening of Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages with a live score by Think Less, Hear More! On top of that, it's been announced that Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon will be the opening night film, the immersive program has been revealed, and there's much more in the latest festival announcement:

(New Orleans, LA) – The Overlook Film Festival is proud to announce its opening night film and second wave of the 2022 festival lineup. These titles join previously announced films and events, including closing night film The Black Phone, for a total of 23 feature films and 25 short films from 16 countries, with 3 World Premieres and 1 North American premiere, along with 10 live events taking place at the Prytania Theatres At Canal Place in New Orleans June 2-5, 2022.

The festival will open with the North American premiere of...

To be in service to somebody else is to develop a habit of constant alertness. It is to learn the fabric or a house, all its creaks and wheezings and tiny sounds which inform one of the movements of its other inhabitants and allow one to anticipate their needs; to catch sight of fleeting shadows which suggest their approach, enabling one to switch registers and avoid being caught looking overly focused on one’s private concerns. In other words, it exposes people to many of the same stresses as a horror film, but over years and years and years. Jenna Cato Bass’ tight, unnerving thriller creates a landscape of small signals which place the viewer in the same state as it explores the subject of servitude in modern South Africa.

This is like Apartheid, Tsidi (Chumisa Cosa) tells her mother after moving back into the rambling plantation-style house in Constantia,...

Exclusive: AMC Networks’ Shudder has picked up South African supernatural horror Good Madam (Mlungu Wam) and is planning a release in late 2022.

The movie debuted at Toronto last year and has since screened at Fantastic Fest, AFI Fest and Goteborg. It will next be seen at the Glasgow Film Festival.

Written and directed by Jenna Cato Bass and co-written by Babalwa Baartman, Good Madam follows Tsidi, a single mother, who is forced to move in with her estranged mother Mavis, a live-in domestic worker caring obsessively for her catatonic white ‘Madam’ in an affluent Cape Town suburb. As Tsidi tries to heal her family however, a sinister specter begins to stir.

Starring are Chumisa Cosa, Nosipho Mtebe, Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya, Sanda Shandu, Khanyiso Kenqa, Sizwe Ginger Lubengu, Siya Sikawuti, Peggy Tunyiswa and Chris Gxalaba. The film is produced by Fox Fire Films, Sanusi Chronicles and Causeway Films in association with Salmira Productions and Strange Charm.

“It’s not that Mama doesn’t like this house — this house doesn’t like Mama,” explains Tsidi to her young daughter Winnie about the roomy, comfortable Cape Town pad in which they’ve recently taken up residence. Tsidi knows the place well. For as long as she can remember, it’s been home to her mother Mavis, which is not to say it’s Mavis’s house: A live-in domestic servant, she has been dutifully maintaining the place for decades for her well-to-do white madam, living and aging and even raising children — her own and otherwise — within walls that at once contain her and eternally reject her. The socially ingrained politics of South Africa’s master-servant culture are ultimately what haunt the house in Jenna Cato Bass’ crisp, chilling chamber piece “Good Madam.”

A quiet, tightly wound horror film, Bass’ fourth and most briskly accomplished feature might flirt with the supernatural,...

South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass might not seem like the obvious choice to direct a horror movie. For most of her life, the 35-year-old helmer has steered clear of scares. “I was really sensitive as a kid,” she tells Variety. Even the sight of a character getting shot was too grisly for her to bear. “Horror was out of the question.”

Bass was in her twenties when she began dipping into the genre. She found herself fascinated by the form — what people found scary, and why — even while she puzzled over why most horror movies were about supernatural menaces, ancient curses or mysterious creatures from the deep: nothing that was “real or rooted in our world.”

That question would eventually lead to “Mlungu Wam” (“Good Madam”), a psychological thriller that world premieres at the Toronto Film Festival. Set in the suburbs of Cape Town, it follows a series of...

A matriarch passes and the family swarms to poach whatever they can in the aftermath. Tsidi (Chumisa Cosa) tells herself it won’t matter—she’s been the one taking care of her grandmother and thus has a claim over that which she has called her home for years, but “fair” doesn’t factor where tradition is concerned. Her uncle (the eldest) allows Tsidi’s cousins to put her in her place as new construction plans made while the recently departed was still alive become colored as some sort of hostile takeover. And then he joins the chorus by telling her what she did means nothing. He decides who gets the house. Tsidi subsequently packs her things, steals her grandmother’s coat, and leaves with her daughter Winnie (Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya).

Where’s she to go, though? She and Winnie’s father (Khanyiso Kenqa’s Luthando) are no longer together,...

Fox Fire Films, Sanusi Chronicles, Causeway Films produced.

Visit Films will kick off world sales later this week on South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass’s TIFF genre title Good Madam (Mlungu Wam) which gets its world premiere in Platform on Thursday (September 9).

Set in the suburbs of Cape Town Good Madam tells of Tsidi, a single parent who moves back in with her estranged mother Mavis, a live-in domestic worker who has been employed by her bedridden white “Madam” for 30 years.

When Tsidi experiences disturbing events that have plagued her mother she uncovers the dark truth behind the relationship Mavis has with her employer.