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)
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.
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.
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.
Meet the Parents (2000)
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 (2016)
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.
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.
Naturally, what he uncovers is a viper’s nest of liars, thieves and schemers – in other words a family like everyone else’s.