By Andrew Swafford, Courtney Anderson, Zach Dennis, Eva Zee, Nadine Smith, Michael O’Malley, Lucy Palmer, Nick Armstrong, and Logan Kenny
The twelve films presented here are grouped into two categories: confronting the crisis and escaping the crisis. In the first half of the list, you’ll find write-ups of six films that, in one way or another, speak to the phenomena of widespread illness, government intervention, and self-quarantine that our writers are currently living through as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic of spring 2019. In the second half, you’ll find write-ups of six completely unrelated films that our writers are using to find solace in these uncertain times.
Note: Contagion is too obvious.
PART ONE: CONFRONTING THE CRISIS
Shin Godzilla (2016) by Hideaki Anno
My last day at work before going into self-quarantine was Thursday, March 12th, the same day my Japanese Cinema students finished a four-day journey through Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla (1954) and Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla (2016). Both films had been scheduled for a long time before our the COVD-19 pandemic came to US shores, but watching the latter as the outbreak was happening – and, crucially, as our government failed (or refused) to respond swiftly – was downright surreal.
The original Godzilla was already an expression of nuclear trauma and an interrogation of scientific ethics, and Hideo Anno broadens the scope of that allegory even further to incorporate the resonance of a more recent disaster, to critique the USA’s domineering relationship to the Japanese government, as well as to satirize the inefficiency of government bureaucracy. The first half of Shin Godzilla (up until the scene when the monster lays waste to Tokyo in earnest) is a cockeyed farce. Made up of anime-style visual compositions and rapid-fire editing, this first stretch of the film takes place mostly in board meetings – which are often dismissed early for the convening of another board meeting, itself dismissed for another board meeting, etc. – and is populated by umpteen important-seeming government officials whose lengthy titles are presented as on-screen text just before the important person in question disappears into a crowd of suits just sitting on their hands. Meanwhile, countless people are dying as a googly-eyed baby Godzilla crawls through busy waterways and crowded streets. It isn’t until a hierarchy-devoid collective of experts comes together to study the monster that anyone begins to develop answers about what to do – and even when those solutions are found, layers upon layers of political red tape keep them from being realized until the highest authority is persuaded to let the process be damned. “We should act unilaterally on humanitarian principle?!” he asks in disbelief when the proposition is floated.
It’s fiction, of course, and can never truly be separated from its specific cultural and historical context, but I found the early goings of Shin Godzilla to be a particularly relevant type of gallows humor – and hey, it features a government that didn’t already come across as openly hostile to vulnerable people and scientific expertise. – Andrew Swafford
The First Purge (2018) by Gerard McMurray
In the midst of a self-quarantine, the reason I find Gerard McMurry’s The First Purge – not to be confused with the first Purge – to be such a fitting watch is because of how it uses its position within a popular franchise to make suburban American audiences reflect on the violence that takes place outside of their sheltered view of the country. The series has a very simple and intriguing premise: for a 12-hour period in America, all crime is legal. This entry, being a prequel to the others, shows the concept being tested in a low-income area in Staten Island, where the predominantly Black residents are paid to either stay in their homes or take part in the purging. In the original Purge, we see how easily the sheltered, white, suburban folks are able to protect themselves during a Purge, because it was never designed to affect them in the first place. The news reports we see in The First Purge feel like the ones we would see in any other Purge film (particularly the original) but the film re-centers the narrative and gives us actual human context to the victims of this “experiment”.
For a long while, we don’t see any violence from any of the city’s inhabitants. Initially we see people stealing money (one man robs an ATM because of all the times it taxed him for taking out his own money) and throwing joyous parties in the streets. This is because it takes some time for others to infiltrate this community and actually commit the crimes that the premise promises: murder, assault and, in this case, racist violence. The agitators aren’t just any people, either, but soldiers specifically sent by the government to kill the people who live in that community. One of the film’s protagonists, Dmitri, starts the film wanting to protect himself and his team of drug dealers (and thus, his income and his loved ones) but eventually realizes he has to step up and protect his community from bigger threats. The government doesn’t follow their own rules because they never mattered in the first place – they were a made up set of excuses that allowed them to kill poor Black people without repercussions.
I think that what makes this film stand out as an important quarantine film in light of COVID-19 is that contrast between this prequel and the original Purge film. The characters in that film are happy to let people die so long as it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives – so long as they don’t have to hear about it in detail or experience the trauma that comes with it. To acknowledge what McMurray’s film does with the premise is to acknowledge that being able to sit comfortably in your home right now, unaffected by illness or tragedy, is a massive privilege that should not go unrecognized. We have to protect ourselves, but we also have to protect our neighbors and loved ones, which means that we cannot be okay with such massive risks to people’s livelihoods just because we aren’t a statistic. The film is not entirely hopeful in its scope – because despite the victory at the end of the film, it is still a prequel to a whole trilogy of others where the Purge still reigns – but it shows how important it is to not let the bigger picture deter you from being hopeful, from doing the work to make the world what you want it to be. The film ends with the words “now we fight,” and I chose this to represent Quarantine Cinema because we still have to do just that. – Nick Armstrong
Ex Machina (2014) by Alex Garland
Despite the powerful ideas it grapples with, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina exists in a small world. The opening moments immediately establish the boundaries which exist between the principal location and the rest of the universe – placing the small cabin at the center of a sprawling estate. Unlike other films which explore isolation, there is no definitive physical barrier which prevents escape. The characters are not momentarily trapped by snow or a rockslide. Instead, both Caleb and Nathan initially impose their own isolation; they voluntarily place themselves in the context of the cabin, unaware of how irrevocable the events which follow will be.
While the reasons currently motivating people to self-isolate are less individualistic, there’s something familiar about the insecurity which exists in these opening moments - the characters move according to their own conscience rather than the environment (as many have isolated themselves without being physically forced to). Caleb seems like a good guy and a natural protagonist. It is easy for the audience to identify with his anxiety and excitement as he makes his way towards the secluded cabin. There are no clear red flags which threaten his journey – even the distance is amber – so it never quite leans into horror, and the stakes remain murky until the very end. In a world where everything has suddenly been turned on its head, this instability is all too relatable.
Everything about Ex Machina is minimalistic, because it doesn’t need to be anything more. There’s an inherent tension associated with a limited number of characters being trapped in a remote location which makes every debate between Caleb and Nathan feel more significant. By focusing so intimately, Garland is also able to paint the central conflicts in stark detail. In many ways, it’s an extended thought-experiment which thrives within the enclosed system, remaining uncorrupted by external factors. Not only does it demonstrate that you don’t need constant action and animation to ask interesting questions, it also hands you those questions to consider… and considering anything aside from COVID-19 right now is a breath of fresh air. – Lucy Palmer
Safe (1995) by Todd Haynes
Cinematary’s podcast discussed this one at length to ring in the Coronavirus-era and to kick-off our current series of movies selected by Patreon supporters (you’re invited to be one, by the way!), but Safe is so good that I feel compelled to recap some of our points here:
Safe is an eerie movie to look at today, as it presents, on its face, the slow-burning downward spiral of a possible hypochondriac (she suffers from “environmental illness” and is convinced that she is “allergic to the 20th century”), but it also depicts with great moral clarity the cruel indifference of her supposed support system. Maybe protagonist Carol White – played with impeccably tight control by Julianne Moore in her career-best performance – is overreacting, or allowing a sense of uncertainty to get the best of her. Or maybe she is being driven continually deeper into fringe/culty psuedoscience as a result of being gaslit by loved ones and failed by one medical professional after another. It is somewhat common knowledge that Haynes intended the film to be read as an allegory about American government’s near-genocidal mishandling of the AIDS epidemic, and Haynes’ career is peppered with stories about individuals whose problems go unrecognized or misunderstood by their societal context: most notably, anorexia in Superstar and industrial poisoning in Dark Waters. He even tosses a reference to “The Yellow Wallpaper” into Safe to let his film harmonize with a broader historical narrative of the medical world getting women’s health entirely wrong. “Environmental illness” may or may not exist as Carol understands it – but she’s being failed by the system either way.
All of this is to mostly sidestep the obvious cinematic qualities of Safe, which takes direct inspiration from the European slow cinema work of Akerman and Antonioni (we get into the specifics on the podcast), but the parallels to our present moment are clear and resounding. Safe intimately captures the intense fear of an invisible force that isn’t yet understood but is potentially everywhere – potentially carried by the fumes of oncoming traffic, potentially clinging to every surface that hasn’t been wiped down, potentially floating among crowds of people large and small. And although today’s medical profession is a mostly unified front on recognizing the Coronavirus threat as real and requiring bold, immediate action (see: Shin Godzilla blurb above), that doesn’t keep highly influential mouthpieces from pacating the frightened with dangerous mistruths: this isn’t a big deal, this is just like the flu, this is going to miraculously go away, everyone is overreacting...and yet, here we are, hunkered down in our own little safe houses, certain in our knowledge that something is wrong, but trying to reassure ourselves it’ll all be okay. – Andrew Swafford
The Crazies (1973) by George Romero
If the function of contemporary zombie movies is all too frequently to evoke the terror of a mindless horde set against a heroic, alternately ennobled or embattled, few – which is little more than a conservative nightmare of proletarian revolt – then George Romero’s zombie movies serve as a necessary leftist antidote to those visions. Almost as if it was tailored for our moment, his film The Crazies conjures a small American town isolated and interpersonally balkanized by an incompetent, intransigent government response to a rapidly spreading epidemic and the ensuing chaos. The citizens, en masse, begin to resist the draconian and contradictory government response, with no clear distinction between the aggression caused by the infection and that caused by the escalating internal pressures of mismanagement and unexplained intrusion into their lives and homes by violent military personnel. Although there is an ostensible central narrative, tracking a small group of would-be quarantine escapees led by a Green Beret veteran, his friend, and his girlfriend, the film so frequently occupies itself with other persons and vignettes within the surrounding diegesis that said narrative ceases to occupy any kind of privileged position, becoming one story among many.
Romero undertakes the task of re-politicizing the subgenre of zombie flicks by refusing to give us the monsters we want to see: his characters, even in the throes of madness, are some of the most recognizably human zombies on film, and his method of intercutting between events that have no relation to the main narrative thread allows us to come to understand this town as a site of state violence and collective resistance rather than a assemblage of unconnected individual survivalists, rendering The Crazies a destabilizing force within a broadly reactionary generic landscape.
The function that this movie uniquely serves as a quarantine film, then, is that it reminds us of our place within a vast social fabric and encourages us to think through what is happening as a political, as well as scientific and epidemiological, event. It’s easy to fall into the logic of individual interest when you feel trapped and scared, but Romero’s film encourages to aid others and seek aid from others, as dangerous a prospect as that may be in volatile times. – Eva Zee
Relaxer (2019) by Joel Potrykus
Relaxer might be just a little bit too real for some viewers to take in during this period of social isolation, but it’s a little uncanny just how prescient the latest film from Joel Potrykus — my favorite movie of 2019 — has ended up being. At the end of the last millennium, a layabout of the highest order named Abbie (Joshua Burge) with a compulsion to participate in absolutely depraved beverage-chugging competitions decides to take on the ultimate challenge: beating the impossible 256th level of Pac-Man. Abbie’s quest requires him to sink deeper and deeper into his couch; not once in the film do we leave his apartment, and not once does he rise from his sofa. But there’s another reason Abbie can’t venture outdoors: Y2K is on its way, and society is beginning to crumble. Potrykus takes environmental calamity to its most Cronenbergian level — as Abbie spends more time in doors, both his psyche and physiological form begin to mutate. It’s a scary prospect to face, but one we all have to reckon with at some point: as viral pandemics and climate change alike force us to spend more time indoors and apart from others, the face of our species is very likely going to change in ways we’re only beginning to comprehend. – Nadine Smith
PART TWO: ESCAPING THE CRISIS
The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004) by Steven Hillenburg
You really want to know what I suggest you watch during this terrifying, anxiety-inducing time? The 2004 masterpiece, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie – the Nickelodeon film centered around the cultural icon that is Spongebob Squarepants.
Yes, I am seriously suggesting that the best movie to watch during your self-imposed isolation/quarantine is Spongebob Squarepants.
The 2004 one. Not the weird, 3D animation one they made in 2015. The one from our childhoods, when life was simple, and we weren’t on the brink of a fucking zombie apocalypse (see: The Crazies blurb above) because people can’t stay indoors and practice basic fucking hygiene.
Here’s my thing: we are currently in the middle of an actual pandemic. The Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has reached pretty much every continent on the planet, infecting millions of people. We are being asked to self-isolate and self-quarantine to help prevent the spread of the deadly, infectious disease. All we can do is sit in our homes, try not eat all of our quarantine snacks at once, and escape into the loving arms of cinema, which will be there to embrace us at all times.
And some of you want to watch movies that actually remind you of how fucked up the real world is right now. Why??
Why would I want to sit here and watch Contagion? So that I can cry and give myself (another) panic attack? I would much rather escape into the whimsy, the nostalgia, the complete and utter ridiculousness that is Spongebob Squarepants.
When you watch something like Spongebob Squarepants, you don’t have to think about the state of the world. You can turn that part of your brain off and enjoy the glory that is Spongebob singing the Goofy Goober song in those white, thigh-high boots and that purple, star-spangled cape.
You can marvel at just how inappropriate the humor really is at times, and you can wonder how/why Spongebob Squarepants managed to get away with some of those jokes. You can watch this foolish movie and discover a newfound appreciation for all the memes this movie spawned.
So, why reinforce all that fear and anxiety building up inside of you by watching a film that is all too relevant right now? Why not dive headfirst into escapism for a couple of hours?
Take a trip to Bikini Bottom. And let your mind rot. – Courtney Anderson
Syndromes and a Century (2006) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last several weeks in a constant haze of anxiety—about your job, about loved ones, about workers in hospitals and grocery stores, about the freakin’ collapse of modern society as we know it. And if you’re further like me, you long for a reprieve from all that, just a moment of solace. Blessedly, I got some, and it was by falling asleep to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century.
Apichatpong, a longtime Cinematary favorite known for his slow-cinema ruminations on the intersection of modern Thailand with its mythological past, is often preoccupied with sleep: his most famous film, 2010’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is about a character who occupies a liminal space between waking and sleeping that allows him to interact with spirits as he approaches death; his 2015 movie Cemetery of Splendor involves a mysterious sleep descending upon a group of soldiers. But Syndromes and a Century, which predates both of these movies, is the only of his movies to actually put me to sleep (something Apichatpong himself encourages!).
The movie consists essentially of three pieces. The first takes place in a hospital in rural Thailand, where the doctors have hushed, amiable conversations with each other and the Buddhist monks seeking treatment. In the movie’s second piece, these same characters have been transposed to a hospital in bustling Bangkok, where they play out iterations of the same scenes as the first part. Between these two pieces, which make up the majority of the movie’s runtime, there’s a plot involving a love triangle among the doctors (apparently inspired by the courtship of Apichatpong’s own parents), but for our purposes, I would say that the plot isn’t really essential, something the movie itself reinforces in its third and final piece; in the final fifteen minutes, the movie abandons plot altogether and instead slips into an unhurried, hypnotic montage of rural and urban imagery, set to the ambient sounds of these environments. This is where I fell asleep.
Apichatpong’s movies are often languorous and ambient, but perhaps more so than any of Apichatpong’s other films I’ve seen, Syndromes and a Century is not just meditative in its approach but actually an invitation to meditate. Its two mirrored halves form a mantra, an intake and exhalation of breath before the trance of the final part creates a blissful ego death.
I can only speak to my own subjective experience, but drifting through this movie and then finally succumbing to it entirely, slipping out of consciousness itself, was a balm for my soul. I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for cinematic comfort food (including perhaps some on this very list), which are great. But Syndromes and a Century isn’t really comfort food in the same way as, say, your favorite rom-com. It’s meeting a different need in crisis, not comfort exactly, but something just as important: peace, if only for a moment. – Michael O’Malley
My Neighbor Totoro (1988) by Hayao Miyazaki
Escape is the most logical route for anyone trying to keep their brain from being enraptured with thoughts of the peril and evil transfixing any device that can broadcast the news, but there should be a bit of construction in our quest to numb.
It would be hard pressed to find a more qualified example of pure escape with a strong soul than My Neighbor Totoro, a film that is, on the one hand, as cutesy and nostalgia-inducing as any animated product, but on the other hand, a film very much astute in its reckoning with our place and the fragility of it in this world.
If we can hold onto something, we can hold onto the notion that we have no power of the earth and what it chooses to do with us, but there is a way to find solace in that and it seems simple to latch our faith onto the benevolence of the environment around us and our spirituality towards its legacy.
My Neighbor Totoro speaks through the nostalgia of a bygone era and feels true and relevant today because it elicits feelings we have all felt – of losing something, someone or just the control of life. It doesn’t have answers for any of these ruminations, but it offers the solution of omniscient peace through a power much greater than us; one that doesn’t feel domineering but in-sync with the best qualities around us. – Zach Dennis
Animal Crossing: The Movie (2006) by Jōji Shimura
During the rough times of quarantine through the Coronavirus, Nintendo released the new Animal Crossing game, New Horizons. It has brought millions of people together, with the unadulterated charms of its calming environment and loving animal companions helping you immerse yourself in small town fantasy life. For me, New Horizons has brought back personal memories of being a kid playing Animal Crossing: Wild World on the Nintendo DS, losing myself in my village and the friendly companions that were a force of solace to me during the isolation of my childhood. Being a kid who felt alone and getting the consolation of a world in which I was quietly loved in a colourful, mediative place with adorable bear friends was what I needed. This is part of what I need now. I still have worries and doubts about the world and my place in it, and have been recently overwhelmed with anxiety about my girlfriend contracting the virus, so I have turned to the game to put some of my more immediate thoughts of distress at bay. When I remembered the existence of the 2006 Animal Crossing movie, I felt an immediate need to find it and lose myself in a feature film with the iconography and feeling of what it was like to be in that world, crafting your own existence somewhere beyond the reaches of reality. From the first moments, where the film simulates the intro of Wild World in taking the human protagonist into their new town Animal Village, I knew that the film was on the right track.
The film’s biggest strengths are in confronting the mechanics of the game through explicit plot points, taking the potential of a villager moving away to another place in your save file and making it part of the protagonist’s journey, confronting a loss that she’s unprepared to deal with in a location that’s supposed to be free of any immediate conflict. The way the film handles the lingering effect of her friend’s departure is surprisingly thoughtful and mature, a perfect way to broach the subject of impermanent connections to young children who will certainly go through their own experiences of separation with friends. It captures the sensation of collecting things for the museum and paying off your debts to Tom Nook through engaging animated sequences, filled with comfort and humour, the vibrancy of the village and the animal’s designs really adding to the overall charm of the picture. While it’s far from the strongest film narratively – with the final act trying to include a semblance of narrative that doesn’t really work as a whole – the film is one of the best examples of reflecting the beauty of simplicity in cinema. There is no lofty goals or heightened ambitions, and that’s okay. All that some people need is companionship and the satisfaction of helping their home grow. Through quarantine, sometimes you just need to see someone find joy and everlasting beauty in the quietness of existence. It’s a wonderful depiction of a series that has meant the world to me, and I’m so grateful that 90 minutes of it is condensed permanently into a feature film. – Logan Kenny
Old Joy (2006) by Kelly Reichardt
So much of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy takes place on the periphery. To describe the plot would be to describe everything not happening in the movie.
The phrase “two old friends reconnect and take an impromptu camping trip in the Pacific Northwest” offers you enough of a definition to get started, but engaging with Old Joy is engaging in what we normally want to ignore. The crux of the pull from this movie comes in what is unsaid, what is left alone and what is resonating with us emotionally.
There’s this comforting hum permeating from this film. A lot of that can be attributed to the work by director Kelly Reichardt, who is no stranger to implanting an almost zen-like relaxation in her movies that while they may be engaging with deep and terrible subjects, feels as if we will be able to take in and comprehend the message in a comfortable fashion – even if we won’t want the information.
That’s definitely felt in Wendy and Lucy or Meek’s Cutoff, but Old Joy feels different; almost as if the mythic quest to the hot springs that Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham) are on feels much grander than just soaking in the water for a few hours in the quiet. There’s something near religious about the corresponding scenes when the two men make it to the hot springs that feels soothing and safe.
Nothing is solved or vindicated in this scene. Instead, it finds this zen pulse that relaxes you into the situation with the men on screen, and lulls you into silence for a few minutes; a silence that is as much about clarity as it is about meaning in the context of the movie.
As mentioned before, this is a quality that Reichardt possesses much more than most contemporary directors, and is an ability that feels on par with masters such as Yasujiro Ozu, Carl Theodor Dreyer or Satyajit Ray. Call it the power of the movies, but here is where Reichardt imparts understanding through the slow, quiet movements of two friends reconnecting in peace. – Zach Dennis
The Dockworker’s Dream (2016) by Bill Morrison
There seems to be something transcent about The Dockworker’s Dream, but finding one word for it is impossible. There’s a marriage of conflicting times fighting against the stamp of progress all happening at once.
In one hand, the film seems to capture this utopic paradise – a kingdom not dictated by might or power, but by solidarity and comradery of a community behind the cause of their own well-being. There is this stillness, or peace, in the daily duties of the dockworker. We see clips of the various jobs being performed, but as the pulsating tones of the Lambchop song breath life behind it, we almost see a bit of serenity in having full health taken care of through one simple profession that occupies a decent part of your day but doesn’t seem to overcome it.
The images of work shift to images of both play and curiosity. There’s a part that wants to repent from these images of cheer and goodwill – set most likely in the Industrial Revolution period of American history as factories and industries engulfed the country, land and environment. There is a lack of definitive peace hidden beneath the current of the film, but the soothing tones of Lambcchp’s “The Hustle” coupled with these clips of unbridled optimism at just the most basic level of living; this coupling of people that seems to spark hope in a future that would never come for most.
It’s hard to not think that this simplicity won’t be offered to future generations, or to many people at this moment in history, but it is undeniable that a sense of optimism shimmers through all of that. Forgetting the pulsating beats of “The Hustle,” it’s easy to get caught up in the naivety of the moment being presented on screen. They didn’t know what was happening right then – or at least the specific people do not – but they’re enjoying this moment of living, of congregating together as one.
It’s almost comforting then that the film shifts to images of the townspeople finding simple joy in the unraveling of some rug or carpet-like fabric. It’s an uninspired act, but one that breaks the minutia enough to elicit a bit of joy and perspective.
These images shift into the final act – a collage of clips where people chase animals across a large plain. The first time seeing them can bubble up some feelings of anger towards the actions by these people against the animals, which doesn’t seem to be a mutually fulfilling experience. But on future viewings, there seems to be that degree of naivety again; these men have no concept of what these other creatures are thinking, and there doesn’t seem to be malice in their intent – just curiosity. The cars stay a distance away from the scattered creatures, but it almost speaks to that freedom the dockworker is imagining as he walks to his job.
The only true freedom can be found in these galloping antelopes and zebras away from these vehicles. Their strides long and vibrant as they make their way away from these people; in the end, they will be the ones who truly can do as they please.
The Dockworker’s Dream does not find much resolve in its final moments –– a return to the worker’s walk to the docks – but it offers a picture of the past through empathetic eyes and offers a portal into the simpleness of life before it came all burning down. – Zach Dennis