Movies to Watch When You Feel Lost in Life: Five Films for the Sunday Night Everyone Else Seems to Have a Plan

It's 9:40 on a Sunday night, and you're setting the alarm for 6:45. Before you can put the phone down, someone you sat next to in college posts a house key, or a baby, or a new job title with the word "Director" in it, and the screen goes quiet in your hand. You aren't unhappy, exactly. You just can't remember choosing any of this, and you can't picture what you'd choose instead. Everyone else seems to have been handed a map at a meeting you missed.

That feeling has a lot of names, from quarter-life crisis to the Sunday scaries, and it turns up at 27 and at 62. Advice doesn't reach it. A movie can do something gentler: let you watch someone else stand on the same blank spot and find, if not a plan, then a reason to get up tomorrow. These five films are ordered like the night itself. We start by laughing at being stuck, run around New York with a woman who is falling behind her friends, take a detour through the Pixar movie that dares to call purpose overrated, reach the emotional peak with a 1952 Tokyo clerk who wakes up late, and close with a man in present-day Tokyo who seems to have worked it out with a mop and a cassette deck.

1. Groundhog Day (1993)

Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh TV weatherman who treats the annual groundhog ceremony in Punxsutawney as an insult to his talent. Then he wakes up and it's February 2 again. And again. Same clock radio, same festival, same lines. Harold Ramis directed and wrote it with Danny Rubin, and Wikipedia's history of the production notes they shot almost entirely in Woodstock, Illinois, in bitterly cold weather; you can feel that cold in every scene on the town square.

It's the right first film because feeling lost often looks exactly like this, the same day on a loop while life seems to happen in some other town, and Murray lets you laugh at it before the movie asks anything of you. Phil tries what stuck people try: indulgence, cynicism, giving up. What finally works is almost embarrassingly ordinary. He starts getting good at things: the piano, ice sculpture, French, the names and troubles of the people around him. On the DVD commentary, Ramis guessed the loop lasted about 10 years, and Collider recounts that by 2009 he had changed his mind, emailing Heeb Magazine that "it takes at least 10 years to get good at anything" and the real figure was "more like 30 or 40 years." Keep that number in your pocket the next time someone else's life looks effortless, because the man charming everyone in town by the final act has decades of unseen practice behind every trick.

Look for: the party near the end, when Phil sits down at the piano and plays for a packed room while Rita (Andie MacDowell) hears townspeople tell story after story about the man who helped them that day. Count back the mornings it took.

2. Frances Ha (2012)

Frances (Greta Gerwig) is 27, an apprentice dancer in New York, and the last person in her circle to notice the party is breaking up. Her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) moves on to a better apartment and a more grown-up life, and Frances starts drifting from one room she can't quite afford to the next, saying the wrong thing at dinner parties with enormous sincerity. Gerwig wrote it with Noah Baumbach, who directed and shot it in black and white, so a story about rent and roommates looks as if it turned up at a 1960s revival house.

This is the movie for the specific sting of being lost while your friends aren't. It also skips the rescue. Baumbach told SBS that only after they finished did he and Gerwig notice there was no love story, and that they were proud of it, because the film is about Frances "finding her own place in the world and not being saved by anybody." He told Industria that at 27 "it wouldn't be honest to say she has found her home," and that there is something moving about accepting that life won't go the way you dreamed. Gerwig plays that acceptance as a comedy of flailing limbs and big laughs, so the film lands as encouragement, never as a lecture.

Look for: Frances running, skipping and spinning down a Manhattan street to David Bowie's "Modern Love." Baumbach told Industria he imagined the chapter opening with her running through Chinatown, then dropped the song in during editing as a nod to Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang (1986), which uses the same track in a similar run. He called it "a retroactive homage."

3. Soul (2020)

Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) teaches middle school band and believes he was born to play jazz piano. On the day he finally lands the gig of his life, an accident sends his soul to the Great Before, the place where new souls get their personalities, and he is paired with 22 (Tina Fey), a soul who has spent thousands of years refusing to go to Earth. Pete Docter and Kemp Powers directed; Jon Batiste wrote the jazz, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote the score.

Most movies about feeling lost promise that you'll find your calling. Soul questions the promise, and it came from its director's own doubts. Docter told Deadline he had always been taught to follow his passion, and that while it brought him joy, "it wasn't leading to this sense of everything is figured out in my life." The film turns that doubt into a running joke. When 22 wonders whether sky-watching might be her spark, or walking, Joe waves it off as "just regular old living." Powers told Deadline they made Joe a jazz musician because "life is about improvising," taking whatever gets thrown at you and turning it into something of value.

Look for: the evening after the big night. Joe admits he thought he'd feel different, and the saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) tells him a tiny story about a young fish searching for "The Ocean" while swimming in it. Then watch what Joe does with the little objects 22 collected on Earth, especially a maple seed that once came spinning down into her hand.

4. Ikiru (1952)

Akira Kurosawa's film opens on an X-ray of a stomach tumor while a narrator flatly tells us whose it is. Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) has sat in the same Tokyo city office for thirty years, presiding over the paperwork that sends a group of local women from desk to desk as they try to turn a polluted patch of wasteland into a children's playground. When he learns he has months to live, he discovers he doesn't know how to spend a single evening. The screenplay drew partly on Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

This is the peak of the night, the film that says out loud what the others only hint at: you can be busy for decades and absent the whole time. Criterion's essay on the film describes Shimura's Watanabe as so withdrawn he is "barely present," shoulders hunched, eyes cast down. His first try at living is a night of drinking and cabarets, and about forty-five minutes in he asks a bar pianist for a song the man calls a "love song from back in the nineteen teens." It's "Gondola no Uta," whose opening line tells young women that life is brief, and Watanabe sings it with tears in his eyes while the dancers stop and stare. The film's real answer isn't a grand gesture. It's that playground, and the dogged, unglamorous patience it takes to get one built.

Spoiler warning: the next paragraph describes how Ikiru's second half is built.

Look for: the swing. Midway through, Kurosawa jumps forward to Watanabe's wake, where his colleagues slowly piece together his last months. A witness tells them he spent his final moments on a swing in the park he built, singing that same song as the snow fell. Kurosawa dictated the scene himself, and since none of his co-writers knew the old song's lyrics, they asked their eldest receptionist, as Wikipedia's history of the film recounts. When the image finally arrives, an old man rocking gently on a swing as the snow comes down, it is one of the most quietly overwhelming shots in movies.

5. Perfect Days (2023)

Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) cleans public toilets in Tokyo's Shibuya district for The Tokyo Toilet, a project of architect-designed restrooms scattered through the city's parks. His days begin at dawn and barely change: cassettes of Patti Smith and Lou Reed in the van, Faulkner and Highsmith before sleep, and at lunch a sandwich under the trees of a shrine, where he points a film camera up at komorebi, the Japanese word for sunlight filtered through leaves. Wim Wenders shot it over 17 days, in a boxy frame that nods to Yasujirō Ozu, and he told AnOther that he named his hero after Chishū Ryū's character in Ozu's Tokyo Story.

It closes the night because Hirayama is everything the Sunday-night voice says you're failing at. He has no title, no five-year plan, and so little spare money that at one point he has to sell a cassette to buy gas. He is also plainly not lost. "I'm not sure if a man like this really exists – but I think he should," Wenders told AnOther, and the film earns the wish by letting the world intrude: a talkative young co-worker, a visit from family, and a calm that costs him more than he lets on. Next to Ikiru, it makes a quiet pair: seven decades apart, two Tokyo men find what they were looking for in a city park, doing work nobody applauds.

Look for: the last scene. Hirayama drives to work at dawn while Nina Simone sings "Feeling Good," and Wenders simply holds on Yakusho's face as one feeling after another washes over it.

Before You Set the Alarm

Line the five up and they share something about being lost. Not one of these people is handed a map. Phil gets the same ordinary day for decades, Frances gets a smaller apartment and no rescue, Joe gets his dream and an odd hollow feeling, Watanabe gets a few months, and Hirayama gets the same morning, over and over, on purpose. What each of them finds instead is a kind of attention: to a piano, a friend, a falling seed, a polluted lot that could hold swings, the light coming through a tree. The ache of feeling lost is the sense that you're losing a race everyone else understood. These films keep suggesting the race was never there, and that a life can be rebuilt around something small enough to do tomorrow morning.

So set the alarm for 6:45, the way you were going to. On the way in tomorrow, play one song you love all the way through and look up once at the trees. And when you want more Shimura, find him two years after Ikiru in our review of Seven Samurai, and watch how the clerk's hunched shoulders have straightened into those of the samurai the farmers follow. More moods are coming.