Movies to Watch When You're Sick: Six Films for a Day Under the Blanket

The text went out at 6:40 a.m.: Not coming in today, sorry. Now it's ten o'clock, the tissue box is half empty, the tea on the nightstand has gone cold, and the light coming through the blinds looks wrong, the way a house looks when you're home at an hour you're never home. Being sick is a strange little holiday nobody asked for: you're too foggy to read, too restless to sleep, and somewhere out there the whole world is carrying on without you.

It's also late October, cold season. Here's a prescription that won't interact with anything in the cabinet. These six films were picked for a sick day in particular: easy to follow with a fever brain, warm all the way through, and in several cases about people who are stuck in bed or stuck indoors themselves. They run like a day on the couch: a story read aloud in the morning, a joyride before lunch, a thriller you can watch without lifting your head, a good cry around dinnertime, a song to get you back on your feet, and a bear with a marmalade sandwich to tuck you in. Keep the remote close and refill the water glass between films.

1. The Princess Bride (1987)

What it is: Rob Reiner's fairy tale of pirates, giants, sword fights and true love, told as a story within a story. A boy (Fred Savage) is home sick in bed when his grandfather (Peter Falk) shows up with a book. Inside it: a farm boy named Westley (Cary Elwes), a princess named Buttercup (Robin Wright), a Spanish swordsman with a score to settle (Mandy Patinkin), and a lot of rodents of unusual size.

Why it fits right now: Because it is, quite literally, a sick-day movie. Before the adventure even begins, the grandfather explains that this is the book his own father read to him when he was sick, and the one he read to the boy's father. It's also a movie that found its people on the couch. Elwes told NPR that Fox's marketing department couldn't work out whether it was a comedy, an adventure or a kids' film, so it did "respectable, modest" business in theaters, and it took almost a decade, and the arrival of the film on VHS, for it to come back from being "mostly dead."

One scene to look for: The cutaways to the bedroom. Early on, the boy offers to try to stay awake, and Falk's deadpan thank-you is the first laugh of the film. Keep an eye on how those little interruptions change as the book goes on, right up to the last exchange at the bedroom door. It's three words you'll have heard before.

2. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

What it is: John Hughes's comedy about a Chicago high school senior (Matthew Broderick) who fakes being sick so convincingly that his parents tiptoe around his bedroom, then spends the day talking straight to the camera while he, his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his gloomy best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) borrow a Ferrari and take the city.

Why it fits right now: This is the sick day you wish you were having. You're the one actually stuck at home with a thermometer, so let Ferris do the running for you: the Sears Tower, a Cubs game, a parade. It even has a patron saint for the rest of us in Cameron, the hypochondriac friend who is flat on his back in bed, sure he's dying, when Ferris calls to drag him out. The whole thing has the breathless energy of something written in a rush, and it was: Hughes wrote the script in less than a week, and Mental Floss, citing Vanity Fair, puts it at six days, with one to spare.

One scene to look for: The trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. Hughes called it a self-indulgent scene and "a place of refuge" for him, and you can feel the movie exhale there. Watch Cameron standing in front of Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, the camera pushing closer and closer into the painted face of a little girl until she dissolves into dots. It's the quietest moment in a loud movie.

3. Rear Window (1954)

What it is: Alfred Hitchcock's thriller about L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies (James Stewart), a photographer stuck in his Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg during a heat wave. With nothing to do but look out the window, he starts watching his neighbors across the courtyard, and slowly becomes convinced that one of them, a salesman named Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has killed his wife.

Why it fits right now: It's the great stuck-at-home movie. Jeff can't leave his chair, so neither can the camera, which almost never steps outside his apartment and his point of view. He even has a visiting nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), who drops in with massages and opinions, and his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) brings dinner. Hitchcock made the view worth the confinement: the courtyard set, with its dancer, its songwriter, its newlyweds and its lonely woman setting a table for a date who never comes, was the largest ever built at Paramount at the time.

One scene to look for: Look into the songwriter's apartment in the first half hour. The man winding the clock on his mantel is Hitchcock himself, making his traditional cameo, and once you spot him you'll scan every window the way Jeff does.

4. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

What it is: Hayao Miyazaki's animated film about two sisters, ten-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei, who move with their father, an archaeology professor, to an old house in the countryside near Tokorozawa around 1955. Their mother is recovering in a hospital nearby. In the woods behind the house lives an enormous, furry forest spirit that Mei names Totoro.

Why it fits right now: Most of this list is about being the sick one. Totoro is about the other side, the kids waiting for someone they love to get well, and it's one of the most personal things Miyazaki ever made. TCM, quoting Helen McCarthy's book on the director, notes that his own mother had spinal tuberculosis and was bedridden from 1947 to 1955, much of it in hospital, before she could be nursed at home; she lived to old age. That history is why the film never treats illness as a plot device. It's weather: a telegram from the hospital, a visit that gets postponed, a little girl setting off on her own with an ear of corn for her mother. Being sick shrinks us back to childhood. We want someone to bring soup, we want to be told it'll be okay, and we notice who shows up. Totoro understands that feeling from the bottom up, and then it gives the girls, and us, a giant soft creature to lean against while we wait.

One scene to look for: The bus stop in the rain. Satsuki waits in the dark with Mei asleep on her back, holding an umbrella for their father, when Totoro steps up beside her with nothing but a leaf on his head. What she does next, and what he does with the sound of raindrops, is one of the purest bits of joy in animation.

5. Singin' in the Rain (1952)

What it is: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's musical comedy about Hollywood's panicked switch from silent pictures to talkies. Kelly plays Don Lockwood, a silent-screen idol; Donald O'Connor is his piano-playing best friend; Debbie Reynolds is the chorus girl he falls for; and Jean Hagen steals every scene as a leading lady whose voice could strip paint.

Why it fits right now: After the cry, you need lifting, and nothing lifts like this. But the reason it belongs on a sick-day list is a story about the most famous scene in it. Donen told the Associated Press that they shot the title number on a backlot street in daylight, with tarpaulins pulled overhead to fake the night. It was summer, it was sweltering under the tarps, and every afternoon around 4 or 5 o'clock they lost water pressure because the people of Culver City were watering their lawns. The number took a day and a half. And, as the Deseret News put it, "Kelly caught a cold." Accounts differ on how ill he was, but the result looks like the happiest man on Earth.

One scene to look for: That title number, of course, but watch his feet. Kelly told the crew exactly where to dig dips in the studio street and sidewalk so the puddles would be waiting when the music wanted a splash. And no, there was no milk in the water: Donen explained the rain shows up because they lit it from behind.

6. Paddington 2 (2017)

What it is: Paul King's sequel about the marmalade-loving bear from Peru (voiced by Ben Whishaw), now settled with the Brown family in London. He takes odd jobs, including window cleaning, to buy an antique pop-up book of London for his Aunt Lucy's 100th birthday. When the book is stolen by Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant), a vain actor reduced to dog-food commercials, Paddington is framed for the theft and sent to prison.

Why it fits right now: It's the end of the day, the fever's broken or close to it, and you need something that feels like a warm bath. This is a movie in which a polite bear accidentally turns an entire prison's laundry pink with one red sock and then wins over the terrifying cook, Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson), with a marmalade sandwich. Variety called it "another near-pawfect family entertainment," and its kindness never curdles into sugar.

One scene to look for: Early on, in Mr. Gruber's antique shop, Paddington imagines walking Aunt Lucy through the pop-up book, and the paper London unfolds around him, buildings flapping up out of the page as he strolls through them. Then stay through the credits: Grant gets a song-and-dance number, Sondheim in pink flares, and it is the right note to fall asleep on.

Before You Fall Asleep

Back to that boy in bed in The Princess Bride. He started the day bored, sniffly and sure nothing good was going to happen, and he ended it asking his grandfather to come back tomorrow and read it again. That's the best a sick day can do: turn the hours you lost into a few you'll remember. If you're still up when the last credits roll, our list of movies for when you can't sleep will keep you company through the small hours.

And save one thing for the next time you watch Rear Window, feeling better and sitting upright: in the final pan across the courtyard, check every window you've been watching all film. Each neighbor's story gets a last beat. More moods are coming. Feel better soon.