Best Films About Loneliness

Loneliness is one of cinema's most-difficult subjects. It is interior, undramatic, hard to render in a frame. The films on this list have all found a way to externalise the interior state — through framing, sound design, and protagonists whose isolation is the film's central subject.

Our picks.

The picks

• Taxi Driver (1976) — Scorsese. The foundational text. Travis Bickle's New York.
• Lost in Translation (2003) — Sofia Coppola. Tokyo. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.
• Her (2013) — Spike Jonze. Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an OS.
• In the Mood for Love (2000) — Wong Kar-wai. The unrequited connection in 1960s Hong Kong.
• Past Lives (2023) — Celine Song. The childhood friend, twenty-four years later.
• Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) — The Coens. A folk singer who isn't quite good enough.
• Drive (2011) — Refn. Gosling. The most-isolated lead of the 2010s.
• Manchester by the Sea (2016) — Kenneth Lonergan. Casey Affleck's Best Actor.
• Joker (2019) — Phoenix's isolation as character study.
• Whisky (2004) — Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll. Uruguayan deadpan. Underrated.
• Nightcrawler (2014) — Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom as the loneliness of the sociopath.
• Paris, Texas (1984) — Wim Wenders. Harry Dean Stanton walks out of the desert.

What the films share

Almost every film on this list uses landscape and architecture as externalisation of the protagonist's interior state. Travis Bickle's New York is dirty and overcrowded but he is alone in it. The Tokyo of Lost in Translation is overwhelming but isolating in its overwhelm. The Hong Kong of In the Mood for Love is dense and intimate but the lovers cannot reach each other.

Sound design does the rest. The hum of refrigerators. The ambient city. The conspicuous quiet of the protagonist's apartment. The technical achievement of films about loneliness is, in most cases, the work of cinematographers and sound designers more than of screenwriters.