The Venice Film Festival wraps up for another year, reminding us once again that it isn’t just a showcase of cinematic storytelling – it’s a feast of production design, interiors, and spaces that linger in the imagination long after the credits roll. This year’s line-up was no exception. From gothic laboratories to textured domestic realism, the festival delivered a visual banquet for anyone interested in how décor, architecture, and atmosphere shape narrative.

From what we’ve seen and heard on the grapevine, allow us to share our take on the films that truly stood out for their interiors and design — each transforming space into a vessel for emotion and inspiration.

Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro

Del Toro trades CGI spectacle for tactile, atmospheric sets that feel heavy with history. Candlelit interiors, gothic laboratories, and richly detailed practical environments root Mary Shelley’s tale in dread, humanity, and fragility. The cast includes Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature, supported by Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance and Felix Kammerer.

This is Frankenstein’s world as only Del Toro could build it: every wall and object imbued with the weight of creation, loss, and monstrous beauty.

Production Design: Tamara Deverell
Set Decoration: Shane Vieau

UK and US theatrical release: 17 October 2025, followed by streaming globally on Netflix from 7 November 2025.

Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos

Production designer James Price crafts a world of stark contrasts in Bugonia: Textured ’90s-inspired domestic interiors (the home of Teddy and Don) suggesting lives “on pause,” layered with lived-in detail and inertia, and sleek corporate environments (the Anxolith pharmaceutical headquarters), a gleaming monolith of power, topped by the CEO’s palatial apartment shimmering with modern luxury.

These juxtapositions sharpen the film’s exploration of class fractures and ideological divides — Lanthimos at his most visually precise, surreal, and biting. Emma Stone stars, with Jesse Plemons among the supporting cast

Venice premiere: August 28, 2025
US release: October 24, 2025 (limited), October 31, 2025 (wide)
UK release: late October 2025 (a screening at the BFI London Film Festival in early October, general release likely around 30 October)

After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino

Guadagnino once again proves himself the master of “luxury realism” with After The Hunt. In this psychological thriller, interiors become emotional battlegrounds: academic lecture halls and offices project institutional prestige while hiding private tensions, and domestic spaces layer intimacy with memory, power, and trauma — not to mention floral sofas, which are so on trend.

The film stars Julia Roberts as a college professor, Ayo Edebiri as her star student Maggie, and Andrew Garfield as a colleague and close friend accused of misconduct. Also featured are Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny in key supporting roles.

Venice premiere: August 29, 2025
US theatrical release: October 10, 2025 (limited), October 17 (wide)
UK release: October 22, 2025

Marc by Sofia, Sofia Coppola

In Marc by Sofia, Coppola turns her restrained, aesthetic lens onto fashion designer Marc Jacobs. Studios, showrooms, and creative workspaces are filmed as cinematic interiors – archives of creativity where sketches, fabrics, and personal objects become as telling as the clothes themselves. It plays as an essay in how creative environments reveal the character of their inhabitant.

The film is an intimate portrait of Marc Jacobs, made by Coppola without a strict script or plan, drawing heavily on their long friendship and his process leading up to his Spring 2024 fashion show.

Venice premiere: September 2, 2025 (presented out of competition)
Further release dates: TBC

Special Mention: Hamnet, Chloé Zhao

Although Hamnet did not premiere at Venice, this adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel is already a much talked-about design-driven film. With production design by Fiona Crombie (The Favourite), the film conjures a richly atmospheric 16th-century world where interiors, landscapes, and objects echo with grief and memory.

Starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, it explores the tragedy that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

What unites these highlights is a commitment to interiors as storytelling. Whether it’s the decaying grandeur of Frankenstein, the corporate gleam of Bugonia, the lived-in gravitas of After the Hunt, the creative intimacy of Marc by Sofia, or the historical resonance of Hamnet, each film reminds us that design is never neutral. Rooms hold atmosphere, memory, and inspiration – and in the hands of visionary directors and production designers, they become the very fabric of cinema.