Marching into the new year armed with shiny-eyed resolutions and Vitamin C for the hangover? Maybe I’m not the character you want to run into today.

I’m so allergic to the muesli jaisa wholesome enterprise of resolutions, I spent the holidays watching films which eschewed resolutions. In Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a man one day informs his best friend, “I just don’t like you no more.” He feels contempt for his friend’s ordinary niceness as he chases posthumous greatness to offset existential despair. Uncompromisingly painful—though funny and fleet-footed—the film offers no redemption. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, outwardly an espionage drama, is suffused with melancholy, loneliness and sexual intensity. It goes to a near-unbearable edge of intimacy, laced with the same dangers of betrayal as espionage, its conclusion both final, and not. Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave parallels love’s erotic intentness with the incessant uncovering of detective work, filling the air with uncertainty and unresolved outcomes. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a little more redemptive, suggests no easy way out of grief except to drive down its long, new road in an old car—because what have we got but our old self, no matter how new the year?