Movies to Watch When You're Lonely: Six Films for a Quiet Friday Night With the Phone Face-Up

It's Friday, a little after eight. The group chat went quiet around six, once everyone else's plans locked into place. You ate dinner standing at the kitchen counter, and now your phone is lying face-up on the couch cushion beside you, just in case. Through the wall, the neighbors are laughing at something you can't quite hear.

Loneliness is hard to admit, even to yourself, because it turns up anywhere: in a busy office, inside a relationship, on a night you technically chose to stay in. The films below know that, and not one of them will tell you to get out more. Their heroes are a waitress who fixes everyone's life but her own, a clerk who lends out his apartment and eats TV dinners alone, a shy man who introduces a doll to his family, a letter writer who falls for his computer, a dog who orders a best friend from a TV ad, and a Tokyo toilet cleaner who may turn out to be the least lonely person you've ever met.

The list runs like an evening: two that go down easy, two that ask a little more of you, the one that will make you cry, and a quiet one to end on. Tonight, somebody on screen is keeping you company.

1. Amélie (2001)

What it is: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Paris fairy tale about Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), a shy waitress at a Montmartre café who decides, after one small discovery, to secretly improve the lives of the people around her: the heartbroken concierge, the greengrocer's bullied assistant, her own stuck father. Everyone's life, that is, except hers.

Why it fits right now: Amélie is lonely the way a lot of us are lonely: busily, cheerfully, with a full calendar of small pleasures. She plunges her hand into a sack of grain, cracks the top of a crème brûlée with a spoon, skips stones on the Canal Saint-Martin. Every one is something you do alone. Jeunet told the Academy his first rule for the script was "It has to be positive," at a time when, he said, feel-good movies didn't really exist. He wrote the part for Emily Watson, who dropped out weeks before shooting, and the accident gave him Tautou. Listen, too, to her neighbor Dufayel, who has copied the same Renoir painting 20 times and still can't capture the girl drinking a glass of water. As the two of them talk about that girl, Amélie is obviously describing herself. It's a confession wearing a disguise.

One scene to look for: Amélie takes a blind man's arm at a street corner and walks him to the Métro, narrating the street scenes they pass in one breathless, delighted rush. It's loneliness turned inside out: she hands a stranger the whole street because she doesn't yet know how to take any of it for herself.

2. The Apartment (1960)

What it is: Billy Wilder's comedy-drama about C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a clerk at an enormous New York insurance company who climbs the ladder by lending his apartment to executives for their affairs. Shirley MacLaine plays Fran Kubelik, the elevator operator he's sweet on. Fred MacMurray plays the boss with a key.

Why it fits right now: Bud's apartment is never really his. He waits on park benches in the cold while other men use it. The film opens with Bud's voice reciting the population of New York City in 1959, all 8,042,783 of them, and the number only makes him smaller. Wilder found the seed in Brief Encounter, where two lovers try to meet in a friend's borrowed flat. Wilder's movie is about the guy who owns the flat. It won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and it's set at Christmas, the season when being alone feels most like a public announcement. Lemmon, whom Wilder usually held to the script word for word, was allowed to improvise twice: once with a squirt of nasal spray, once straining spaghetti through the strings of a tennis racket.

One scene to look for: Early on, Bud settles in front of the television with a TV dinner, thrilled that Grand Hotel is about to start. The title is announced, the stars are announced, and then the sponsors' messages keep coming, and coming, between him and the movie. A man alone with a tray on his lap, waiting for the good part to begin. You may recognize the posture.

3. Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

What it is: Craig Gillespie's comedy-drama. Lars (Ryan Gosling) lives in the converted garage behind his brother's house in small-town Minnesota, flinches when anyone touches him, and dodges his sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) whenever she tries to draw him in. Then one night he announces he has a visitor he met online: Bianca, a missionary. Bianca is a life-size doll.

Why it fits right now: It sounds like the setup for a cringe comedy. It's actually a tender film about a whole town deciding to show up for one person. The family doctor (Patricia Clarkson) "diagnoses" Bianca with low blood pressure so Lars will bring her in for weekly treatments, which are really sessions with him. The town treats Bianca as real, then quietly fills her schedule with volunteer work and meetings, which nudges Lars into evenings where he has no one to hide behind. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver found the idea while researching "weird websites" for an article. She wrote the script in 2002, and it went on to an Oscar nomination.

One scene to look for: While Bianca is "at a school board meeting," Lars finally says yes to bowling with Margo (Kelli Garner), the coworker he's been avoiding for half the movie. It's a first date neither would dare call one, and the town's whole strategy pays off: when you're lonely, sometimes you need a reason to go out that isn't about you.

4. Her (2013)

What it is: Spike Jonze's romance set in a near-future Los Angeles. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) writes heartfelt personal letters for strangers at a company that sells them. He's in the middle of a divorce, and he buys a new artificially intelligent operating system that names itself Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).

Why it fits right now: Watched now, in the age of chatbots, Her plays less like science fiction and more like a home movie. But it never sneers at Theodore, which is why it hurts. Jonze got the idea in the early 2000s after reading about a website that let you instant-message with an AI program, and won the screenplay Oscar for it. Notice what's missing from the frame: blue. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema drained it out as much as he could because it felt too sci-fi, so this future glows instead of gleaming. Samantha Morton voiced Samantha during the shoot, and Jonze recast the role with Johansson in post-production, shooting extra scenes in August 2013. The voice Theodore falls in love with arrived after the cameras had stopped.

One scene to look for: The opening. Phoenix's face fills the screen as he dictates a tender, intimate love letter, and only slowly do you realize he's at an office desk, writing for a couple he has never met. A man who puts other people's love into words all day and goes home to nobody: the whole film is in that first minute.

5. Robot Dreams (2023)

What it is: Pablo Berger's Oscar-nominated animated film, adapted from Sara Varon's 2007 graphic novel. In a 1980s Manhattan populated by animals, a lonely Dog sees a TV ad for a robot companion and orders one. They spend a perfect summer together, until a trip to the beach at Coney Island leaves Robot rusted stiff in the sand, and the beach closes for the season before Dog can get him back.

Why it fits right now: This is the night's emotional peak. Keep tissues close. Nobody in the film says a word, which means nothing stands between you and the feeling of Dog's empty apartment. Berger told the BFI that the graphic novel starts and ends in September, which is how Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" became Dog and Robot's song, and that the film is about memory: about the people who aren't in your life anymore but stay with you anyway. He compared the pair to Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca: "Robot and Dog will always have New York." Keep an eye on the Twin Towers in the skyline. Berger said they stand for the friendship itself.

One scene to look for: Dog and Robot dancing in Central Park to "September," the happiest few minutes in the film. Then notice what the song does to you when it comes back later. It's the same tune, and it means something completely different, which is exactly what loneliness does to the songs you used to share.

6. Perfect Days (2023)

What it is: Wim Wenders' Tokyo film about Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), who cleans the designer public restrooms of Shibuya's Tokyo Toilet project. He wakes before dawn, waters his plants, and drives his little van across the city to cassettes of the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones and Nina Simone. At lunch he sits under the same trees and photographs the sunlight through the leaves on an old film camera.

Why it fits right now: End the night here, because this film gently draws the line between loneliness and solitude. Hirayama lives alone and barely speaks; Yakusho told the Academy this might be the only time he'd get to make a film with so few lines, and he loved it. He won Best Actor at Cannes for it anyway. Wenders and cinematographer Franz Lustig shot it handheld in just sixteen days, and the soundtrack is drawn from Wenders' own favorite music of the '70s and '80s. A title card at the end defines komorebi, the light that filters through leaves, as something that "only exists once, at that moment."

One scene to look for: In one of the stalls, Hirayama finds a scrap of paper tucked away with a game of tic-tac-toe on it. He makes his move and leaves it there. The game goes on across the film with a stranger he never meets. It's a friendship the size of a napkin, and maybe the most hopeful thing on this list: proof that you can be alone and still be in conversation with somebody.

Before You Turn Off the Lamp

Somewhere along the way, the phone on the cushion probably buzzed, or it didn't, and maybe that stopped mattering. Turn it face down. Every film here starts with someone lonely in a room and finds a little light: a blind man's arm, a game of gin rummy, a bowling alley, a voice, a song, a scrap of paper in a stall.

If the night runs long, our list of movies for when you can't sleep picks up right where this one leaves off. And on a rewatch of Perfect Days, stay with the final shot: a long close-up of Yakusho behind the wheel as Nina Simone sings "Feeling Good," his face moving from a smile to tears and back again. More moods are coming soon.