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© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 38 movies from Lava Films
In a fairy-tale kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira battles to compete with her incredibly beautiful stepsister, and she will go to any length to catch the prince’s eye.
Mar 2025
Dual timelines explore a Japanese widow's memories spanning post-war Nagasaki in 1950s and England during 1980s Cold War era, unraveling secrets that intertwine her past and present experiences across borders.
Sep 2025
A music journalist accompanies her father, a charmingly stubborn Holocaust survivor, on a journey to his homeland. While she's eager to make sense of her family's past, her dad has an agenda of his own.
Jun 2024
Struggling to survive in post-WWI Copenhagen, a newly unemployed and pregnant young woman is taken in by a charismatic elder to help run an underground adoption agency. The two form an unexpected bond, until a sudden discovery changes everything.
Sep 2024
Denmark in 1927. The ambitious police officer Otto Himmelstrup leads the newly formed Special Unit, which is tasked with assisting local police in solving particularly difficult crimes. When a body is found in a burnt-out summer house in Esbjerg, Otto and his team begin to unravel an unusual murder mystery, revealing power struggles and corruption among the city’s elite. The closer the unit gets to the truth, the more dangerous it becomes. Soon, Otto finds himself not only battling powerful enemies but also confronting his own dark side in his quest to solve the case.
Aug 2025
As an unpredictable, sweeping pandemic causes people to develop sudden amnesia, a man finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help him build a new life. His treatment: performing daily tasks prescribed by his doctors on cassette tape, and capturing those with a Polaroid camera.
May 2021
Questioning the suspicious death of his mother, a university professor and his enigmatic gardener descend into a hypnotic maze of mirrors and memories. As family secrets surface and painful truths emerge, they spiral toward a devastating reckoning with the darkness lurking within us all.
Apr 2025
Jacob, a man who believes he is a wolf trapped in a human body, is sent to a clinic by his family where he is forced to undergo increasingly extreme forms of "curative" therapies at the hands of The Zookeeper. Jacob’s only solace is the enigmatic Wildcat, with whom he roams the hospital in the dead of night. The two form an improbable friendship that develops into infatuation.
Dec 2021
A Swedish TV presenter finally confronts her domineering husband about serious accusations made against him, causing her well-ordered life to unravel.
Dec 2024
Three days in the life of fitness motivator Sylwia Zając, whose presence on social media has made her a celebrity. Although she has hundreds of thousands of followers, is surrounded by loyal employees and admired by acquaintances, she is looking for true intimacy.
Mar 2021
The life of a man after he experiences forgotten baby syndrome, unintentionally leaving his infant daughter in the back seat of his car.
A bridegroom is possessed by an unquiet spirit in the midst of his own wedding celebration, in this clever take on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.
Oct 2015
Lena is seven months pregnant and she's ready to sell the baby in her belly. Ermanno agrees to pretend to be the father. Fabio, the uncle of Ermanno, will pay them to buy the child that he and his wife Bianca cannot have. A fake adoption between relatives, a loophole to bypass the law in Italy. A world in which money is the only standard of value, the only thing that matters. Ermanno and Lena are two strangers that must pretend in public to be a couple and live together until the delivery. They are used to only thinking about themselves and they fight all the time. But living side by side they start becoming what they were only pretending to be.
Oct 2019
A perfect couple rents a holiday home on a sunny Italian island. The reality does not live up to their expectations when they find out that the pool in the house is broken. Ignorant of the fact that the island faces water shortage, they ask for someone to fix it. The constant presence of a stranger invades the couple's idea of safety and starts a chain of events, which makes them act instinctively and irrationally, heading to the darkest place in their relationship.
Aug 2022
After years together, Petr and Hana, partners in work and in life, share their unspoken erotic fantasies. What begins as an innocent conversation gradually turns into curious experimentation with a non-monogamous approach to their relationship. But sexual freedom tastes differently for each of them.
Nov 2022
Champion fighter Osvald is banned from competing after injuring a girl in a street fight. Stranded in his bleak Lithuanian hometown, he takes refuge in a run-down Taiwanese restaurant owned by his only friend, Ju-Long. Court-ordered therapy leads him to Skaistė, a woman who offers a glimpse of a life he's never known. But as Osvald clings to this fragile hope, his violent past resurfaces, forcing him to choose between redemption and self-destruction.
Feb 2026
At the age of five, Chris, a young village boy meets his mother, Czesława, who is at the cusp of conquering entertainment industry by adopting a new persona - Violetta Villas. An unbelievably talented, ambitious mother and a sensitive child go on a decades long journey through Warsaw, Paris and Las Vegas.
Nov 2026
South Africa, Free State region, isolated stronghold to the Afrikaans white ethnic minority culture. In this conservative farming territory obsessed with strength and masculinity, Janno is different, secretive, emotionally frail. One day his mother, fiercely religious, brings home Pieter, a hardened street orphan she wants to save, and asks Janno to make this stranger into his brother. The two boys start a fight for power, heritage and parental love.
Aug 2018
Zenia is an industrious Ukrainian migrant worker in Poland who makes house calls as a masseur to the needy and aspirational residents of a middle-class gated community near Warsaw. He is privy to all of their problems, anxieties and secrets – and something of an unwitting guru figure. Zenia’s grounded spirituality, apparent healing powers and broad shoulders make him an object of lust for many of the lost souls in the community.
A Warsaw-based Vietnamese cook struggles to fit into the European culture, which his ten-year-old daughter has already embraced as her own. A story about love, misunderstanding and food.
Jul 2020