Belgian stop-motion absurdism and Finnish deadpan, McDonagh's pitch-black register and Östlund's icy social satire: European comedy refuses to behave.
European comedy is harder to define than European drama, which is part of its appeal. Hollywood has a recognisable house style, the four-quadrant film built to land its laughs on roughly the same beats in every English-speaking market. Europe has dozens of comic traditions in dozens of languages, and the best of them are stubbornly local: a Belgian stop-motion film about plastic toys, a Finnish road movie about a metal band that has never played a gig, a French fable about a quadriplegic aristocrat and his caregiver. Their specificity is exactly why they travel.
The register varies wildly. Roberto Benigni built a Tuscan fable so tender it became one of the most argued-over films of its decade. Ruben Östlund draws comedy out of human discomfort with surgical cruelty, and Martin McDonagh's profane, Irish-inflected dialogue can turn into theology without warning. Jean-Pierre Jeunet paints a Paris that exists nowhere outside the cinema and dares you to mind. Maren Ade made a 162-minute father-daughter portrait containing one of the strangest party sequences in modern European film. What links them is ambition: each film is plainly the work of a director who would not treat comedy as a lesser form.
Below are ten films, ordered loosely from the canonical to the cult, that sketch the range between them. Several won Palmes and Oscars; others won almost nothing and are still finding their audience one viewer at a time. All of them are funny in ways that survive translation, and several are doing a great deal more than being funny.
1. In Bruges
Dir. Martin McDonagh · UK / US · Crime comedy · BAFTA Best Original Screenplay
Martin McDonagh came to his 2008 debut feature after a celebrated theatre career as the playwright of The Pillowman and the Aran Islands trilogy. It sends two hitmen to the medieval Belgian city of Bruges to lie low after a job has gone badly wrong. Colin Farrell plays the panicky Ray, in the performance that remade his career and got him out of the Hollywood studio machine; Brendan Gleeson is the gravely watchful Ken, and Ralph Fiennes their London boss, Harry. The film follows the pair through a few days in the city as they wait for instructions.
In Bruges won the BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for the Academy Award in the same category. It works at once as a broad gangster comedy, a study of guilt and responsibility, and a sly look at Bruges as both tourist experience and real place. Eigil Bryld's photography of the city's architecture and Carter Burwell's score keep an undertow of feeling running beneath the swearing. McDonagh carried the same broad-then-suddenly-intimate register into Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inisherin, but his partnership with Farrell and Gleeson started here.
2. Amélie
Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet · France / Germany · Romantic comedy · 5 Césars, 5 Oscar nominations
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) opened in 2001 and became one of the decade's most successful French films abroad, with a $174 million worldwide gross, five Césars including Best Film and Best Director, and five Academy Award nominations including Best Foreign Language Film. It made Audrey Tautou a global star and fixed the Jeunet look and tone (saturated colour, whimsical magical realism, elaborate chains of small consequences) that runs through his later work.
Tautou plays a shy waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre who finds a tin box of childhood treasures hidden in her apartment wall and decides to devote herself to secretly improving the lives of the lonely Parisians around her. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Nino, who collects discarded strips of passport photos at the Gare du Nord. Bruno Delbonnel's photography and Yann Tiersen's accordion-heavy score produced a Paris that critics at the time called artificially clean, and that audiences loved as the most charming sustained vision of the city in modern cinema. Twenty years on, you can still hear the score in cafés and tourist shops all over Europe.
3. Toni Erdmann
Dir. Maren Ade · Germany / Austria · Comedy-drama · European Film Award Best Film
Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 2016, in a year when many expected it to take the Palme too. It didn't, but it won the European Film Award for Best Film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film made Ade the most internationally important German director of her generation, and made a major European actress of Sandra Hüller, later the star of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest.
Hüller plays Ines, a German management consultant in Bucharest working on an oil-company restructuring that will mean mass redundancies. Her father Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a newly retired piano teacher with a weakness for elaborate practical jokes, arrives unannounced and starts turning up in her professional life as a life coach called Toni Erdmann, with false teeth and a wig, in ever more inappropriate settings. The film asks what each of them owes the other, and what their very different kinds of work are doing to them. Few 162-minute films waste so few frames, and few comedies commit so completely to the awkwardness their premise demands.
4. Triangle of Sadness
Dir. Ruben Östlund · Sweden / France / UK / Germany · Satire · Palme d'Or
Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d'Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival in May 2022. It was his second, after The Square in 2017, which put him among only nine directors in the festival's history to win the prize twice. At the 2023 ceremony it was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
A celebrity model couple (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean) join a luxury yacht cruise full of obscenely rich passengers and their servile crew, under a drunken Marxist captain (Woody Harrelson). Dolly de Leon, Zlatko Burić and Vicki Berlin lead the supporting cast. Dean, a South African actress in her breakthrough English-language role, died of bacterial sepsis two months after the Cannes win and shortly before the film's U.S. release; the film is dedicated to her. It was shot mainly off the Aegean island of Evia and at Bavaria Filmstudios in Munich, and grossed over $34 million worldwide on a budget of roughly $16 million, one of the highest-grossing Palme winners of the 2020s. As satire, it is as sharp and as cold as anything Östlund has made.
5. The Banshees of Inisherin
Dir. Martin McDonagh · Ireland / UK · Drama-comedy · 9 Oscar nominations
Martin McDonagh's 2022 film reunited him with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, his leads in In Bruges fourteen years earlier. On a remote Irish island in 1923, Pádraic (Farrell) is stunned when his lifelong friend Colm (Gleeson) abruptly ends their friendship and will give no reason except that he no longer wants to spend time with him. Matters escalate from there. Kerry Condon plays Pádraic's sister Siobhán, and Barry Keoghan the island outcast Dominic.
At Venice 2022 the film won Best Screenplay and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor (Farrell). The following year it dominated the BAFTAs, winning Best British Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Keoghan) and Best Supporting Actress (Condon), and at the Golden Globes it took Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, Best Screenplay and Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. Nine Academy Award nominations followed, Best Picture and Best Director among them. Shot mainly on Inishmore and Achill Island in the autumn of 2021, with photography by Ben Davis and a score by Carter Burwell, it is McDonagh at his bleakest and funniest, and probably his most fully realised film.
6. The Intouchables
Dir. Olivier Nakache & Éric Toledano · France · Comedy-drama · César Best Actor
Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano's The Intouchables opened in France in November 2011 and became, at the time, the second-highest-grossing French-language film ever made, with over €425 million worldwide and more than nineteen million admissions in France alone. Omar Sy won the César for Best Actor at the 2012 ceremony, the first Black actor to win in the category, beating Jean Dujardin in the year Dujardin won the Academy Award for The Artist.
The film is loosely based on the real story of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, a wealthy Parisian aristocrat left quadriplegic, and Abdel Sellou, the young man from the projects he hired as his live-in carer; di Borgo told the story of their relationship in his 2001 memoir. Sy is paired with François Cluzet, one of France's most dependable leading men since 2000. Mathieu Vadepied shot it and Ludovico Einaudi wrote the score. It led directly to an American remake (The Upside, 2017) and to Indian, Korean and Spanish versions, but the warmth and comic timing of Sy and Cluzet keep people coming back to the original.
7. Life Is Beautiful
Dir. Roberto Benigni · Italy · Tragicomedy · 3 Academy Awards
Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 1998, then three Academy Awards at the 71st ceremony in 1999: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Dramatic Score for Nicola Piovani, and Best Actor for Benigni, the first man ever to win that category for a performance not in English. It became one of the most widely seen works of post-war Italian-Jewish cinema, and one of the most disputed Holocaust films of any decade.
Guido Orefice (Benigni), a charming and incurably optimistic Jewish-Italian waiter in a small Tuscan town in the late 1930s, falls in love with the schoolteacher Dora, played by Benigni's real-life wife Nicoletta Braschi. The first half of the film follows their courtship, their marriage and the early years of family life with their young son Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini). Benigni's decision to bring broad commedia-italiana physical comedy to one of the gravest subjects in twentieth-century European history is what made the film so contested. Critics have swung sharply for and against it over the years, while its reach with family audiences around the world has stayed large.
8. Sing Street
Dir. John Carney · Ireland / UK · Musical comedy · Golden Globe nominee
John Carney's Sing Street completed his unofficial Dublin music trilogy after Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013). It premiered at Sundance in January 2016 and was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy and the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. In 1980s Dublin, a teenager escaping a troubled home and a rough new school starts a band to impress a mysterious girl, and the band begins turning out ever more accomplished pastiches of every new-wave and synth-pop record they can find.
Newcomer Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, then sixteen, leads the cast as Conor alongside Lucy Boynton, with Jack Reynor as his older brother and Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy as the parents. Carney co-wrote the original songs with Gary Clark of Danny Wilson, and Drive It Like You Stole It in particular was picked out as one of the year's best original film songs. The film was shot at Synge Street CBS, the Christian Brothers' school Carney himself attended in the 1980s, and a stage adaptation has since opened in New York and London. It is a gentle comedy, and as a film about being a teenager and making things, an unreasonably moving one.
9. A Town Called Panic
Dir. Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar · Belgium / France / Luxembourg · Stop-motion · Cannes Out of Competition
Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's A Town Called Panic (Panique au village) screened Out of Competition at Cannes 2009, the first stop-motion animated feature the festival had ever programmed and the first animated Belgian feature in its selection. It grew out of a short series the pair had made for Belgian and French television since 2000, and won Magritte Awards for Best Sound and Best Production Design.
Three plastic toys, the brusque Cowboy, the easygoing Indian and their long-suffering Horse, share a ramshackle house in a tiny mountain village where everyday life keeps tipping into chaos. When Cowboy and Indian order fifty million bricks instead of fifty for Horse's birthday, the disaster sends the trio off into worlds a toy-village film has no business visiting. The figures are moved one frame at a time on tabletop sets, and the result looks like no computer-animated children's film. Its commercial reach was modest, but its influence among animators has been out of all proportion, and Aubier and Patar still make shorts in the same world.
10. Heavy Trip
Dir. Juuso Laatio & Jukka Vidgren · Finland / Norway · Music comedy · Tribeca selection
Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren's Heavy Trip (Hevi reissu) opened in 2018, played Tribeca and won the Jussi Award for Best Original Score. It became one of Finland's most widely exported recent comedies and a cult favourite among metal fans across Europe and North America. Both directors had backgrounds in Finnish heavy-metal journalism, and the script draws partly on real lore from the country's underground metal scene.
The four members of Impaled Rektum, by their own description a "symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal" band, have rehearsed in their drummer's basement for twelve years without playing a single live show. Lead singer Turo (Johannes Holopainen) works at a reindeer-rendering plant, the bassist at the local library and the guitarist at the supermarket. When a famous Norwegian festival booker turns up by accident in their small Finnish town, the band sees an opening, and a road trip toward the festival begins. It is a broad road movie, an affectionate send-up of metal's pretensions and a warm coming-of-age story in roughly equal parts. A 2024 sequel, Heavier Trip, took the original cast further afield.
What Europe Laughs At
Seen together, these films are rarely about gags. They are about discomfort and embarrassment, and almost always about the gap between how people present themselves and how everyone else sees them. Ines's father in Toni Erdmann, the yacht passengers in Triangle of Sadness, the hitmen of Bruges and the band in Heavy Trip are all built on a social mismatch, and each film watches it play out without quite letting the audience off the hook.
They also share a respect for craft. None of these directors treats comedy as the easier genre. Jeunet shot Amélie with the compositional discipline he brought to Delicatessen, and Östlund stages his comic set pieces with the precision of chamber drama. Ade ran Toni Erdmann to 162 minutes and refused to cut a scene; Aubier and Patar spent eighteen months moving plastic figurines one frame at a time to make a film about a horse-riding lesson. The laughs land harder because the films take the work seriously.
If this list has given you a taste for the regional flavours, our 10 Must-Watch French Films covers more of the Jeunet-Audiard-Ozon register, our 10 Must-Watch Irish Films sits squarely in McDonagh and Carney territory, and our 10 Must-Watch Belgian Films is the next stop for anyone who has just finished A Town Called Panic and wants to know the rest of the country's cinema.
