There is a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It is the tiredness that comes from too many conversations, too many obligations, too many people needing things from you in ways you did not agree to. It is the mood that gets called misanthropy by people who want to pathologise it, but is really just a very reasonable response to other people being, on balance, a lot.
The films on this list were not all chosen because they are dark or cynical. Some of them are. Others are here because they understand something more precise: that the antidote to too much human contact is not more human contact, but a couple of hours with characters who are either magnificently worse than you feel, or quietly, honestly alone in a way that makes aloneness feel like a complete and sufficient thing.
When You Need Someone Onscreen to Be Worse Than You Feel
Gone Girl
A woman disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary. What the film is actually about is the performance of marriage, the violence of expectation, and two people who have decided that the most honest expression of who they are is to destroy each other as completely as possible. Gone Girl is a film for when you want to watch someone take their resentment to its absolute logical conclusion. Fincher shoots it with the precision of a man who finds human behaviour genuinely fascinating and finds human beings genuinely appalling. Both feelings are correct. Rosamund Pike's performance is one of the most controlled and terrifying in recent cinema. The ending does not offer resolution. It offers something better: honesty.
American Psycho
A Manhattan investment banker in 1987 is consumed by vanity, status, and the desire to commit violence. What Harron and Bale understand, and what separates this from simple provocation, is that Patrick Bateman is not an aberration. He is an extreme on a continuum. The film's target is not one man's psychosis but a culture so hollow that a psychopath fits perfectly inside it, unremarkable among his peers. On the right day, watching Bateman navigate a world of interchangeable business cards and interchangeable men with a barely concealed contempt that mirrors your own is the most satisfying two hours cinema can offer. The film does not ask you to like him. It asks you to recognise the world he's in.
The Favourite
Two cousins compete for the favour of a physically and emotionally declining Queen Anne in early eighteenth-century England. Lanthimos makes films about people who use other people instrumentally, and The Favourite is his most entertaining study of that instinct. Every character in this film is pursuing something at someone else's expense. There is no one to root for and no reason to feel bad about that, because the film does not ask for sympathy. It asks for attention, and rewards it with the most precisely observed portrait of social competition as a form of warfare since All About Eve. Cold, very funny, and deeply satisfying when you have spent the day surrounded by people who are doing exactly this but with fewer wigs.
Parasite
A poor family in Seoul gradually infiltrates the household of a wealthy family. The genius of Parasite is that it refuses to let you settle. You root for the Kims, then feel uncomfortable rooting for the Kims, then feel uncomfortable feeling uncomfortable, and by the end Bong has made it impossible to feel superior to anyone in the frame, including yourself. This is a film about the way class structures everyone's behaviour and warps everyone's choices, and about the specific fury that comes from understanding that the system is not broken but working exactly as designed. Watch it on a day when you feel the truth of that. It will not make you feel better. It will make you feel understood, which is a different and more useful thing.
Triangle of Sadness
A model couple board a luxury cruise. A storm arrives. Then things get considerably worse for everyone with money. Ostlund made Force Majeure and The Square, both films about people who discover that their self-image and their behaviour under pressure are two different things. Triangle of Sadness is his most savage and most broadly funny version of that idea. The dinner scene during the storm is one of the most committed set pieces in recent cinema. It is also deeply, specifically cathartic on a day when you are tired of watching people with power behave as though it makes them good. The film dismantles that equation with considerable pleasure.
Films That Understand Misanthropy Without Wallowing In It
About Schmidt
A recently retired insurance actuary drives across the country in his RV to attend his daughter's wedding to a man he cannot stand, writing letters to a Tanzanian orphan he sponsors along the way. Jack Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, a man who has spent sixty-six years doing the right things and arriving at the end of them to find that the right things have produced a life of startling emptiness. About Schmidt is not a nihilistic film. It is a precise and compassionate one. It understands how a person becomes Schmidt - the small capitulations, the unexpressed feelings, the gradually calcified routines - and it asks you to look at that clearly rather than look away. The final scene is one of the finest in Payne's career and will reach you differently depending on what kind of tired you are when you watch it.
Fargo
A car salesman hires two criminals to kidnap his wife. Almost everything that follows goes wrong in ways that were entirely preventable by people who were not quite so catastrophically stupid. The Coens made Fargo as a film about the specific horror of watching people cause enormous damage through nothing more than small-mindedness and bad judgment, and set against it Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson, who is decent, competent, and completely unimpressed. On a day when the world feels like an unbroken sequence of preventable disasters caused by people who should know better, Fargo is the correct film. Marge is not a fantasy of competence. She is a reminder that it is possible to move through the same world everyone else is in and simply not be an idiot about it.
In Bruges
Two hitmen are sent to lie low in Bruges after a job goes badly wrong. Ray hates Bruges. Ken finds it beautiful. Their boss calls eventually with instructions that complicate things considerably. In Bruges is a film about guilt and self-contempt that disguises itself as a comedy and reveals itself, about halfway through, to be something much darker and more honest. Colin Farrell's performance is one of his finest: a man who has done something unforgivable and has decided, as a coping strategy, to be maximally unpleasant about everything else. The film understands that misanthropy often has a specific origin. It is not a worldview so much as a wound wearing a worldview as a coat. If you are in a mood, it knows where that mood probably came from.
The Lobster
In a near-future world, single people are sent to a hotel and given forty-five days to find a partner, or be transformed into an animal of their choosing. The Lobster is Lanthimos's most precise film about the coercive violence of social expectation. The hotel's rules - you must find compatibility, you must demonstrate it, you must perform coupledom convincingly or be punished - are a deadpan exaggeration of pressures that are entirely real and entirely familiar. The film is for people who have ever felt the exhaustion of being required to want the things everyone agrees you should want. It does not resolve that exhaustion. It names it with total accuracy, in a world where the naming itself is the relief.
Quietly Antisocial
Paterson
A bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey writes poetry in a small notebook, drives his route, listens to conversations, comes home to his wife and his dog, and does it again the next day. Paterson is not a film about opting out of the world. It is a film about what it looks like to be in the world without needing the world to confirm you. Adam Driver plays a man of radical interiority: he notices everything, needs little, and finds most of what he requires inside the space between one thought and the next. On a day when other people feel like too much, Paterson is a film about the sufficiency of your own company. It is quiet and warm and completely without irony, and it will make you feel that being left alone is not a punishment but a gift.
Frances Ha
A twenty-seven-year-old dancer in New York cannot quite get her life to cohere. She moves apartments. She falls out of step with her best friend. She goes to Paris for forty-eight hours on a credit card. Frances Ha is not a misanthropic film. Frances is not a misanthrope. But it is a film about the specific discomfort of being someone who does not fit the shape that everyone around you seems to have found without effort, and about the particular loneliness of not being able to explain why you don't fit it. Greta Gerwig plays Frances with a kind of desperate warmth that makes her impossible not to love. If you are someone who has ever felt slightly out of phase with the world, this film sees that with more precision and more affection than almost anything else.
Into the Wild
After graduating from university, Christopher McCandless donates his savings to charity, abandons his car, burns his cash, and walks into America, eventually alone into the Alaskan wilderness. Sean Penn's film is not an uncritical celebration of what McCandless does. It understands his argument - that the social machinery of modern life produces a specific kind of suffocation - and it also understands the cost of pressing that argument to its limit. Emile Hirsch plays McCandless with a conviction that makes you feel the pull of what he is doing even when you can see where it is heading. On a day when you want to leave everything and everyone, this is the film that takes that feeling seriously, follows it to its end, and lets you sit with both the freedom and the consequence.
A Ghost Story
A man dies in a car accident near his home and returns as a ghost, unable to leave the house, watching his wife grieve and eventually move on. Lowery films this in a nearly square aspect ratio and holds shots for as long as the feeling requires, which is sometimes several minutes. A Ghost Story is not a horror film. It is a film about what it is to be present in a place after everyone who made that place matter has gone. On a day when you want to be left alone, this film understands aloneness not as a failure state but as a complete condition with its own particular weight and its own particular clarity. It is one of the most unusual and quietly devastating films of the last decade.
The Ones That Somehow Make You Like People Again
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
A misfit kid from the city is placed with foster parents in the New Zealand bush. After a death and a misunderstanding, he and his gruff, unwilling foster uncle end up on the run from the authorities through the wilderness. Waititi's film is for people who are currently finding the world too much, because it is about two people who feel exactly that way and discover, against their considerable resistance, that the world occasionally produces something worth staying for. Sam Neill's Hec is one of the great cinematic grumps: a man who has decided that connection is not worth the risk and is being proven wrong by a twelve-year-old who needs him too much to let him stay decided. This film will not fix anything. It will remind you that being irritating and being worth loving are not mutually exclusive.
Paddington 2
Paddington Brown is wrongly convicted of theft and sent to prison, where he gradually, through nothing more complicated than consistent good manners and genuine interest in other people, transforms the culture of the institution entirely. Paddington 2 is on this list not as a joke but as a prescription. It is a film that takes the premise that most people, when treated with patience and warmth, will respond in kind, and then commits to that premise without condescension and without sentimentality. Hugh Grant plays the villain with evident delight. The prison scenes are among the funniest in any British film of the last twenty years. And the film's argument, stated quietly and demonstrated rather than announced, is that choosing to believe the best of people is not naive. It is the most demanding and most necessary act available. On a day when you hate everyone, this is the film that makes the counter-argument best.
Films about misanthropy work because they tell the truth about the feeling without requiring you to fix it. The best ones don't talk you out of anything. They sit with you until you're ready to go back.
The films on this list were chosen because they meet you where you are. Some of them will give you the satisfaction of watching someone else's contempt played out to its full conclusion. Others will offer something quieter: a reminder that solitude is not a symptom, that opting out is sometimes the sanest available response, and that the impulse to close the door and be left alone is not misanthropy so much as self-knowledge.
If you find yourself returning to films like these at certain points, that probably tells you something useful. Not that you hate people, but that you need, occasionally, not to be required to love them for a couple of hours. That is a legitimate need. These films honour it.