Collection · Films
Films About Isolation
What it feels like when the world goes quiet.
There is a kind of film that doesn't try to fill its own silences. The frame holds longer than is comfortable, the score sits back, and what's left is the texture of a person being alone with their own thoughts.
The films in this list aren't sad, exactly. They're attentive. They notice what loneliness is for — what it makes possible, what it ruins, what it asks of us.
Blade Runner 2049
Denis Villeneuve · 2017
K's loneliness is the film's actual subject. Everything else is window dressing.
Her
Spike Jonze · 2013
Loneliness in a city of eight million, mediated by an OS that listens.
Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky
The original cinematic argument that loneliness is contagious — even an alien ocean catches it from us.
Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola
Two strangers in a hotel; isolation as a meeting place.