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Jack Nicholson and Danny Lloyd in a still from The Shining, one of five movies on our list to watch during lockdown about fictional families in horrible situations.

From The Shining to Meet the Parents, five top movies for lockdown about being stuck with your family – you’ll appreciate yours more after

  • Is being stuck at home getting too much to handle? Here are five films about living with family that might make you reconsider how bad you’ve really got it

With lockdown syndrome affecting our most intimate relationships, here are five movies about being stuck with your nearest and not necessarily dearest…

The Shining (1980)

Based on Stephen King’s 1977 bestseller, Stanley Kubrick’s chilly horror – critically maligned upon release – is now considered a classic of the genre.
When failed writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) lands a job as the caretaker of the Overlook, a haunted hotel in the Colorado Rockies, he brings his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) along for the winter. What could possibly go wrong? Seeing as the last guy murdered his family with an axe and Jack’s an alcoholic with anger management issues… quite a bit.

Jack welcomes the solitude to concentrate on his novel, to begin with. But cabin fever soon sets in, Danny starts seeing ghosts in the empty rooms and corridors, and marital tensions reach baseball-bat-in-the-face levels of hostility.

Although there are theories abound about the film’s smudgy subtext (Rodney Asher’s exhaustive 2012 documentary Room 237 covers the craziest), viewed today, it just looks like the ultimate lockdown metaphor.
The Seventh Continent by Michael Haneke is perfect pandemic viewing for the perverse.

The Seventh Continent (1989)

Austrian director Michael Haneke makes severe, intellectually rigorous experiments in cruelty. Often, he traps his characters in awful situations – a home invasion in Funny Games; a blackmail plot in Hidden; chronic illness in Amour – and forces us to watch as things inevitably deteriorate.

This austere debut is no exception. Inspired by a newspaper article, it shows an ordinary family – dad Georg (Dieter Berner), mum Anna (Birgit Doll) and daughter Evi (Leni Tanzer) – going about their daily business with a detached, deadened air. For the first 30 minutes, we don’t even see their faces.

After quitting their jobs and closing their bank accounts, the family claim to be emigrating to Australia – the seventh continent of the title – but instead go home, eat a fancy meal, and begin destroying all their possessions one by one.

What follows is an attempt to reckon with what Haneke calls “my country’s emotional glaciation” and is powerfully, painfully hypnotic. In short, perfect pandemic viewing for the perverse.

Robert de Niro (left) with Ben Stiller in a still from Meet the Parents. Photo: Universal Pictures

Meet the Parents (2000)

Jay Roach’s odd couple comedy explores the lighter side of being stuck with (someone else’s) family. The fall guy is nurse Greg (Ben Stiller, in a role originally intended for Jim Carrey), whose attempts to propose to his girlfriend, Pam (Teri Polo), are continually thwarted during a trip home for her sister’s wedding.
While Pam’s mother Dina (Blythe Danner, Gwyneth Paltrow’s mum) and brother Denny (Jon Abrahams) are nice enough, her dad Jack is none other than Robert De Niro – and a retired CIA agent to boot. Having decided that Greg isn’t good enough for his daughter, Jack starts putting him through the wringer.

Cue an escalating series of accidents and annoyances, from losing the cat to breaking the bride-to-be’s nose. Stiller is perfectly cast as the frustrated Greg, De Niro brings decades of well-honed menace to the role of nightmare father, and the sense of simmering injustice will strike a chord with anyone who’s done their best to impress an implacable in-law.

Dearest Sister by Mattie Do is a drama of toxic interdependence spiked with supernatural episodes.

Dearest Sister (2016)

Laotian filmmaker Mattie Do is the country’s first – and, so far, only – female director. The fact that she favours horror-adjacent fare like this ghostly tale puts her even further out on her own.

To earn money for her family, poor country girl Nok (Amphaiphun Phommapunya) is sent to the big city to look after her rich cousin Ana (Vilouna Phetmany), who is losing her sight. So begins a drama of toxic interdependence spiked with – genuinely unnerving – supernatural episodes.

Ana, it turns out, suffers visions of the recently deceased, who whisper the winning lottery numbers to her, something Nok soon takes advantage of.

Although this is, admittedly, a situation unlikely to be replicated in real life, the film captures the resentment that festers between distant relations forced to live together. “One morning I woke up, and the entire world was closing around me,” says Ana of her illness. We all know how that feels.

A still from Knives Out, a sprightly whodunnit that is perfect lockdown viewing. Photo: MRC II Distribution Company LP

Knives Out (2019)

The mechanics of a murder mystery dictate that disparate characters must be stuck, Cluedo-like, in the same location while a detective sniffs out their darkest secrets. Frankly, family life during lockdown can feel pretty similar.

Inspired by the work of Agatha Christie, and named after a Radiohead song, Rian Johnson’s sprightly whodunnit centres on the Thrombeys, a clan of bickering back-stabbers including Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette and Chris Evans.
Gathered together at the Massachusetts mansion of patriarch/crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) to celebrate his 85th birthday, they’re shocked to find him dead with a slit throat. But can his devoted nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) really be to blame? Enter wobbly accented Deep South private dick Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to find out.

Naturally, what he uncovers is a viper’s nest of liars, thieves and schemers – in other words a family like everyone else’s.

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