What is the best directorial debut of the 2010s?

By YPB Team

The 2010s produced some of modern horror and indie cinema's most striking debut features — from social-horror revelations to intimate character studies. Which first film was the decade's best?

The Babadook

Jennifer Kent's 2014 debut weaponizes a children's pop-up book monster as a metaphor for grief and depression — a psychologically sophisticated horror film that redefined the genre.

1000pts

Get Out

Jordan Peele's 2017 debut fused social satire with Hitchcockian thriller mechanics to create a precision-engineered horror film about race in America — one of the decade's most discussed movies.

999pts

Raw

Julia Ducournau's 2016 debut about a vegetarian veterinary student awakening to cannibalistic urges is a visceral, feminist coming-of-age horror that caused fainting at Toronto and earned unanimous critical acclaim.

999pts

Hereditary

Ari Aster's 2018 debut is a family trauma drama that metastasizes into occult horror — widely praised as the most terrifying debut since Rosemary's Baby and a startling display of formal control.

933pts

The Witch

Robert Eggers' 2015 debut — a Puritan New England folk horror set in 1630 — is as much a study in paranoia and religious patriarchy as it is a supernatural film.

799pts

Whiplash

Damien Chazelle's 2014 Sundance breakthrough — a jazz-drumming student under a sadistic conservatory instructor — is one of cinema's most viscerally stressful depictions of artistic obsession.

699pts

Ex Machina

Alex Garland's 2014 debut is a tautly choreographed three-hander about artificial intelligence, manipulation, and what it means to be sentient — cerebral sci-fi at its finest.

559pts

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Benh Zeitlin's 2012 debut shot in the Louisiana bayou with non-professional actors created a genuinely mythic child's-eye vision of displacement and wonder that won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize.

559pts

Krisha

Trey Edward Shults' 2015 debut, shot for under $30,000 with his own family as cast, tracks a recovering addict's disastrous Thanksgiving return — an intense, formally inventive micro-budget triumph.

349pts

Short Term 12

Destin Daniel Cretton's 2013 debut is an intimate, emotionally honest portrait of staff and residents at a foster-care facility — grounded in lived experience and anchored by Brie Larson's breakthrough performance.

0pts

Booksmart

Olivia Wilde's 2019 debut is a sharply funny, genuinely warm high-school comedy that updates the genre for the modern era through two overachieving best friends' last-night-of-senior-year odyssey.

0pts

Safety Not Guaranteed

Colin Trevorrow's 2012 debut is a charming indie about magazine interns investigating a man who claims to be building a time machine — genuinely whimsical without being precious.