The best movies about isolation that speak to our moment

Published in The Washington Post

At the beginning of the movie “Room,” Jack wakes up in the shed where he’s spent every minute of his life in captivity, and greets his friends: “Good morning, Wardrobe. Good morning, TV. Good morning, Sink. Good morning, Toilet. Good morning, everyone.”

It’s hard not to feel like Jack these days, with our household objects becoming more familiar, especially through frequent 20-second meetups with our mutual acquaintance Sink.

Emma Donoghue, the writer of the movie and the original novel, researched how families survive hardships. “Creating your own routine, your own rituals, can help shape your time in a way that feels active and meaningful,” she says via email. “So doing laundry becomes an adventure.”

While virus movies such as “Contagion” and “Outbreak” speak directly to our time, movies in enclosed spaces, like “Room,” do so in more subtle ways. For many of us, staying at home is a privilege — the situation isn’t as extreme as a film plot. But even when movies confine characters far from home, on islands or in spaceships, they show shades of our present moment — our solitariness, our resiliency, our fear of what’s outside — and reveal how we might emerge from this pandemic transformed.

Many tight settings are harder to pull off than it appears. “Film is an outdoor medium, not an indoor medium,” says the screenwriting guru Robert McKee via phone from his Connecticut home. “The camera wants to move. The camera wants to go places physically that no other medium can.”

TV has become more cinematic recently, but its hallmark is the one-set sitcom. Theater is already a closed space. Novels are comfortable not only in rooms, but in minds. Movies beg for variety.

Still, enclosed spaces force screenwriters to get creative — and that can pay dividends. “If people are confined like that, the pressure that puts them under should crack them open in ways that nobody would see coming,” says McKee, to reveal “the truth of who people are and what they really think and really feel.”

Here are some movies that reveal a truth or two about our circumstances, starting with how we’re . . .

Coping with loneliness

The Hollywood everyman Tom Hanks is often trapped in a metaphorical every-space, be it an airport (“The Terminal”), a spacecraft to the moon (“Apollo 13”), a child’s bedroom (“Toy Story”) or an island. It’s easy to forget that “Cast Away” (2000) begins with a meditation on human interconnectedness: a series of shots from the perspective of a package, leading to a scene where Hanks’s FedEx exec trains workers in post-Soviet Russia, the epitome of globalization. He thrives with others — we also see him at a party, and a proposal to his girlfriend is imminent.

The irony is that Hanks ends up alone, after a plane crash, and finds his only friend, a volleyball (Wilson), in a FedEx box. At a time when deliveries are fraught and imperative, it’s chilling to re-watch a movie in which packages keep this man alive in many ways, especially by maintaining his faith that one day he will return to life as a social animal.

Another film about a seemingly deserted island, an inanimate friend and a brush with suicide is “Swiss Army Man” (2016). The bored loner Hank (Paul Dano) starts to hang himself, but a dead body named Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore and soon comes to life. As they bond, Manny exhibits some extreme bodily functions — Hank rides him like a Jet Ski, powered by his farts. But Hank teaches him that those are just part of being human: “Back in civilization there’s 7 billion other living people on the planet just running around, and blinking and breathing and eating and you used to be one of them.” Is Manny just a projection? Is Hank reminding himself?

It all speaks to a moment when many of us at home are stewing in our eccentricities and our alienation, hoping someone else out there feels the way we do. But we’re recognizing that our primal needs, while normally the source of insecurities, are what makes us human. We are all strange, because the world is strange.

Trying to make do

Anyone who’s been staring into the fridge and wondering how to assemble the remaining grocery shards into a respectable lunch might find inspiration in Matt Damon’s stranded space explorer in “The Martian” (2015).

“I’ve got to figure out a way to grow three year’s worth of food here, on a planet where nothing grows,” he says, and then, in a gloriously contrived moment, points to a manual with his occupation typed on it: “Luckily, I’m a botanist.”

We hearten at his first little potato sprout, and cringe when he runs out of ketchup. (Remember this when it feels like you’re the only one of your friends without sourdough starter.)

The resourcefulness in space movies reflects not only what’s happening inside our homes today but on a macro scale among our government scientists. The best moment in “Apollo 13” (1995) is when the NASA engineers in Houston find dummy versions of all the tubes, sprockets and gizmos that are on board the endangered ship, dump them on a table and try to figure out what the astronauts should construct to survive.

“We got to find a way to make this [square thing] fit into a hole for this [round thing] using nothing but that,” one says, and lo and behold, they make that square thing and that round thing fit together. The movie’s continual hubbub of experts is an idealized version of a bureaucracy responding to an unexpected blow, and trying to prevent a catastrophe.

Fulfilling our obligations to others

A room of jurors debating the guilt of a teen charged with murder seems to have little to do with a virus. But watching the deliberations in “12 Angry Men” (1957) today, it’s striking to witness the same divide that’s splitting our country: An increasing number become totally fine staying in confinement in the name of civic duty, while others are desperate to get back to their normal lives. The jurors test each other’s patience in the name of safety, to protect people they have never met and never will. One is hankering to get to a baseball game. Another notices that the door is locked from the outside. Their puzzle is complicated but they can’t leave until they figure it out.

Duty becomes even more fraught in “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935), about a British navy crew that revolts against their tyrannical Captain Bligh. The men are at sea for two years before they can see their families again — but it’s not the enclosed space that’s bothersome as much as the questionable leadership it fosters.

It’s easy to connect the film to the coronavirus’s test of political hierarchies, especially since President Trump mentioned “Mutiny on the Bounty” in a mysterious tweet about Democratic governors. Or to tie it to the recent controversy over the Navy captain who was relieved of command after an email about his ship’s covid-19 breakout became public — eventually leading the Navy secretary to resign.

And it takes a pandemic to find a deeper meaning in “Speed” (1994). The bus, it turns out, isn’t just for banging into things and jumping over things, it’s a utopian collaboration among a cross-section of L.A. citizens who just happen to end up together and save each other from demise — with the help of Keanu Reeves’s clear-minded cop, who’s basically their Anthony Fauci.

Jan de Bont, the director of “Speed” and director of photography on the similarly claustrophobic “Die Hard” and “The Hunt for Red October,” says via phone from Los Angeles that social distancers today “understand that they’re in this together and if you don’t do it you can endanger the life of other people and they can endanger your life. All three movies have a similar feeling — that you all become dependent on each other.”

It’s no accident that “Speed” also traps characters in two other commuting vehicles, an elevator and a subway. “A space that should be safe and guarding you, that becomes a dangerous space,” de Bont says.

“I always show ceilings,” he adds. “It can be safe because it’s protecting us from natural disasters, but it can be oppressive like it’s coming down on you. I like people to be aware of windows and doors. I want people to be aware nonstop of the limitations of the space that you’re in.”

Keeping the danger away

“A Quiet Place” (2018) begins with a family’s terrifying trip to get medicine at a grocery store. But mainly they have to stay close to home and cannot make a sound, surrounded by super-hearing monsters. We see the newspaper headlines they’ve collected: “New York City on lock down.” “Shanghai death toll.” “What you need to know to survive.”

The family, with parents played by John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, will feel familiar to those today doing what they can to keep the coronavirus out: home schooling, improvised meals, lack of privacy, calculated risks. And the ban on talking evokes our own communication breakdowns: What happens when you’re pushed to the edge while unable to use every tool of expression and love?

Horror movies often take place in enclosed environments — “so there can be no way out,” McKee points out. In “10 Cloverfield Lane” (2016), Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up from a car accident to discover that she’s trapped in a bunker, with a man who claims he saved her life by protecting her from a world that’s been attacked and now contaminated. At one point she even finds a way to make her own mask, all the while wondering the same thing we are: Is it worth taking a chance and getting out?

Helping our minds escape

Alfred Hitchcock set movies in a single apartment (“Rope”) and a single vessel (“Lifeboat”), but the one to watch now is “Rear Window” (1954). James Stewart is an adventure photographer in a wheelchair with a broken leg and can’t help but peek into his neighbors’ homes, noticing small moments and spinning them into dramas. Meanwhile, aching for distraction, we fixate on our co-workers’ living rooms during Zoom calls and proclaim the power of Stanley Tucci’s negroni instructional video.

“Rear Window” also evokes the yearning of relationships during lockdown, in the photographer’s romance with a socialite played by Grace Kelly. When she jokingly asks about his “love life,” he coyly responds, “Not too active.” Like co-quarantiners, their relationship eventually requires risks to move forward.

The documentary “This Is Not a Film” (2011) examines another restless artist cut off from his passion. We watch the famed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi during his house arrest pending a trial, as he’s banned from making films. (The movie had to be smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive inside a cake.) He recruits a colleague to follow him with a camera and can’t help but act out the movie he wants to make, using yellow tape to create the outline of a set on his rug — ultimately turning this existential crisis into a meditation on the need to create.

Finding a new perspective on normal life

Sandra Bullock’s rookie astronaut in “Gravity” (2013) shows a methodical persistence despite being out of her element — as a fire rages on a space station, she picks up the escape pod’s manual and calmly turns pages. But later, in a moment of weakness, the tragedy of her life back home overcomes her and, like many characters on this list, she starts to give up. Eventually, despite nature’s powerful forces and the technical challenges of overcoming them, she chooses life.

In “Room” (2015), once Jack and his mother escape their shed, he wears a mask, since he’s not immune to diseases, and describes the world in the only the way someone who’s lived his entire life inside can. “There’s doors and more doors and behind all the doors there’s another inside and another outside, and things happen, happen, happen.”

“There’s so much of place in the world,” he adds. “There’s less time because the time has to be spread extra thin over all the places, like butter.”

Donoghue — whose upcoming novel, “The Pull of the Stars,” is coincidentally set during the 1918 pandemic — finds that many of us are seeing our smaller spaces “more thickly buttered with time.”

“This feels like a forced break to me, a convalescence,” she says, adding: “I’m enjoying waking slow and drowsily rather than to an alarm, and when my kids ask me for something I get to say, ‘Sure, I’ll do that right now.’ I just hope we can hold onto some of these insights when lockdown’s over, the calendars fill up and the ticking clock starts up again.”