The Year the Movies Went Big on Isolation

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two lovers who are officially Going Through It decamp to a Cabin in the Woods to work things out. 2025 featured a series of sweaty, intimate thrillers about couples therapy exercises gone dangerously wrong. Both Osgood Perkins’s Keeper and Drew Hancock’s Companion center on wolves in cozy lambswool sweaters shepherding their girlfriends on not-so-perfect getaways. Meanwhile, Michael Shanks’s Together and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love orbit long-tenured couples trying to solve their co-dependency issues by cozying up in the middle of nowhere. The conceptual connections between these films are so pronounced that you could almost swap around their titles and cast members without arousing suspicion. After all, if an awards-season release featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson loudly copulating in the forest comes out and nobody sees it, does it really make a sound?

Not all two-handers are created equal: Let the record show that Die My Love—the one with J-Law and R-Patz and a soundtrack eclectic enough to juxtapose John Prine, Raffi, and Toni Basil—is the only Keeper (sorry) in that particular bunch. That’s because Lynne Ramsay is a fearless filmmaker, accountable only to herself. That’s her warbling Joy Division over the end credits; the closing image of a forest ablaze could represent $20 million of distributor funds going up in smoke.

The collection of isolation movies widens considerably when you factor in the strange proliferation of movies set in and around ominous, out-of-the-way compounds. There’s Opus (a reclusive pop star lures visitors to a VIP listening party in the desert); Death of a Unicorn (a dying millionaire lures visitors to a secret laboratory in the Rockies); and Bring Her Back (a foster mother lures visitors to her place as potential sacrifices for an occult ritual). The deliriously satirical plotline of Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud—an internet reseller pursued to the boonies by his vengeful clientele—rhymes with the brain-wormed insinuations of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, about a ruthless CEO shanghaied into flyover country by an angry employee. In the sticks, nobody can hear you scream.

Shooting in a remote, self-contained location can be good for more than atmosphere: It’s a way for filmmakers to keep costs down and maintain formal control. (Exhibit A: Sam Raimi’s 1981 masterpiece The Evil Dead, the primal scene of the cabin-in-the-woods genre.) But this setup has been in vogue beyond horror movies recently. Two fine new French films, Suspended Time and Misericordia—one a neurotic comedy of manners; the other a perversely funny Hitchcock riff—feature city-slicker prodigal sons revisiting their provincial hometowns (“I’ve spent a lifetime running away from this house,” sighs Suspended Time’s hero as he surveys his new-old digs). In French-Canadian director Philippe Lesage’s skillful ensemble drama Who by Fire (named for noted Quebecois recluse Leonard Cohen), a well-manicured summer home serves as a cozy perch for a group of culture vultures to squawk and peck the days away.

Two very different movies about real-life musical icons were styled as exercises in self-containment: Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon strands Lorenz Hart in a corner booth at Sardi’s, while Scott Cooper’s Deliver Me From Nowhere documents Bruce Springsteen’s shut-in period during the recording of Nebraska. The protagonists of Anemone and One Battle After Another have opted for self-imposed exile, in an attempt to evade the consequences of their past political activism; encounters with comparable free-radical types punctuate movies as disparate as The Running Man and The Mastermind (which also could have switched titles, while we’re at it). Even Ryan Coogler’s adrenaline-pumping, blood-soaked summer box-office champ Sinners—technically a horror movie, although far more ambitious beneath its B-movie surfaces—fits the bill; the juke joint erected by the identical twins played by Michael B. Jordan is located well off the main drag in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a lone outpost that Coogler styles as a microcosm of Black solidarity (and cultural expression) in the segregated Jim Crow–era landscape.

The plot points and dramatic contexts of these movies are varied and distinctive, as are their respective historical backdrops. But their shared focus on and fascination with isolation suggests something blowing in the proverbial wind. Retreating to sparsely populated and remote settings, these films did not attempt to build dense webs of social relations or to show their characters moving through a world shaped by the constantly changing interplay of class, race, intersecting regional cultures, affinities, or subcultures. They were at best close-up studies of individuals on the brink; studies of firsthand experience rather than its ripples through a community or culture.

“Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” says Jesse Plemons’s black-pilled kidnapper to Emma Stone as she awakens from a drug-induced stupor in his basement early on in Bugonia; of all the carefully engineered ironies in Will Tracy’s screenplay—adapted from the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet!—the fact that a guy whose mission is ostensibly to protect the human race doesn’t seem interested in interacting with friends or neighbors is probably the cleverest.

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st Century in America” wrote Derek Thompson earlier this year in The Atlantic. “The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity.” Thompson’s essay rounds up the usual suspects—encroaching political conservatism, the lingering specter of Covid, the hypnotic thrall of smartphones, the strange pressurization of downtime by regular doses of dopamine—without necessarily taking anybody into custody. Trying to pin the global loneliness epidemic on a single culprit is a mug’s game, of course, but the fact that movies, mainstream and independent alike, seem reluctant to depict social relations except as a structuring absence hints that artists are aware of this lack of fellow feeling. Whether the pile-up of stories set in the middle of nowhere represents an attempt at diagnosis or capitulation is hard to say.

It’s telling, perhaps, that the only two end-of-year Hollywood movies with something like a social vision are set on the far side of the uncanny valley. The superficial resemblances between Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire and Ash are there for the taking: mysterious witchcraft; rebellious animal uprisings; and, lurking at the edges of the crowd-pleasing spectacle, subplots about manufactured consent under the flag of militarized authoritarianism. (If Jeff Goldblum hadn’t been available, James Cameron would have made a great Wizard of Oz; he’s also probably the only working filmmaker ruthless enough to get the yellow brick road built in real life.) Both of these movies are conscious of race, caste, and class, albeit in ways that serve their storylines (and flatter their audiences); they’re able to evince that panoramic perspective thanks to the freedom (and artifice) of digital world building. If For Good and Fire and Ash reflect reality—however successfully—it’s by doing an end run around it.

For actual steel-and-glass cityscapes—and characters whose trajectories intersect at ground level—the pickings were slim. The title of Spike Lee’s underrated Akira Kurosawa remake, Highest 2 Lowest, summarizes the descent of Denzel Washington’s slick, complacent rap-world power broker from his ivory tower into the MTA to chase down the extortionists trying to separate him from his fortune. Leave it to a loud-and-proud New Yorker like Spike to stay focused on the cosmopolitan cacophony of his hometown (a chase through a Puerto Rican Pride parade in the South Bronx represents the filmmaker at his carnivalesque best).

The stratification of big-city living was also present in Celine Song’s much-maligned romantic comedy Materialists, which tried to deconstruct matters of economic inequality in the form of the two princes—one rich, one poor—kneeling before Dakota Johnson’s mercenary-minded matchmaker; that the film felt more otherworldly than anything on Pandora suggests either a filmmaker too spaced-out for her own good or else one in control of her alienation effects (a crossover sequel between Materialists and Avatar, wherein Pedro Pascal’s deep-pocketed short king custom-orders a nine-foot-tall Na’vi avatar could be a classic).

There was one 2025 movie that seemed to have it both ways: Ari Aster’s Eddington, which serves simultaneously as a despairing diagnosis of twenty-first-century solipsism and a richly detailed work of local portraiture. Joaquin Phoenix’s embattled Sheriff goes from standing up for the downtrodden residents of his New Mexico backwater to shooting them down; the best joke, though, is how the residents of Eddington go from taking comfort in their literal and figurative distance from major American cities—a good geographical position during the early days of the pandemic—to believing that their Main Street represents the center of the universe, at which point the neighborly behavior they prize so highly goes out the window.

The critics who accused Aster of playing both sides against the middle were so triggered by Eddington’s cheaper shots that they didn’t clock (or concede) that such top-down manipulation was its real subject. The closing image of the SolidGoldMagikarp data center blinking away in the darkness at the edge of town serves nicely as a punch line to Eddington’s plot. It could also be an emblem of a global loneliness industrial complex designed to divide and conquer under the banner of connectivity. “Love will tear us apart,” sings a female voice over the end credits of Die My Love; seems it’s already too late.