Every Surreal Thing You Forgot Happens in ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’

The fourth Potter film, directed by Mike Newell and squeezed awkwardly between the Alfonso Cuaron and David Yates eras of the franchise, is quietly the most solidly-constructed of them all. And it’s full of weird shit I had totally forgotten about…

Ireland play Bulgaria in the Quidditch World Cup final, and are introduced with a giant dancing leprechaun in the sky, a fiddle jig and a bunch of signs saying “Top O The Mornin’”.

So I was 8 years old when this film came out, and it… it features a really scary Klan rally in the first 15 minutes. I don’t know how they expected children to recover from that.

The most unrealistic thing in the entire Potter series is that underage students wouldn’t need parental permission before entering a potentially fatal death contest.

We as a society do not sufficiently discuss that the Pulp frontman/human embodiment of The Guardian newspaper performs at the Yule Ball. And it’s an original song that could only have been written by someone who hasn’t got a clue what Harry Potter is all about. Fantastic.

There’s a weird quasi-romance/love triangle plot with Harry and Cho Chang — a new character, remember — that they shouldn’t have bothered including in the film. She appears again in Order of the Phoenix (if I remember correctly, they kiss?) but she’s just not handled very well as a character.

This is the moment we should stop rooting for Harry and Ron. What absolute buzzkill losers, moping around and refusing to entertain their delightful dates.

Followed by this amazing moment of Hermione reminding Ronald that she, too, has feelings. The first sincere burst of feminist energy in the whole series, I’d argue.

Voldemort’s rebirth is one trippy-as-fuck sequence, culminating in some very Alien-esque midair fetal transformation.

There’s an Inquisition flashback where Bulgarian Steve Buscemi appears in a scary spiky cage and gives names of confirmed Death Eaters.

Amos Diggory, father of Cedrick (Robert Pattinson) is the spitting image of Andy Daly, and it’s really distracting, especially during his emotionally-draining “MY BOYYYYYYY” scene at the end.