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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
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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.
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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 (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.
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