The Year the Movies Went Big on Isolation

Retreating to sparsely populated and remote settings, these films did not attempt to build dense webs of social relations or to show their characters moving through the world.

The plot points and dramatic contexts of these movies are varied and distinctive, as are their respective historical backdrops. But their shared focus on and fascination with isolation suggests something blowing in the proverbial wind. Retreating to sparsely populated and remote settings, these films did not attempt to build dense webs of social relations or to show their characters moving through a world shaped by the constantly changing interplay of class, race, intersecting regional cultures, affinities, or subcultures. They were at best close-up studies of individuals on the brink; studies of firsthand experience rather than its ripples through a community or culture.

“Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” says Jesse Plemons’s black-pilled kidnapper to Emma Stone as she awakens from a drug-induced stupor in his basement early on in Bugonia; of all the carefully engineered ironies in Will Tracy’s screenplay—adapted from the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet!—the fact that a guy whose mission is ostensibly to protect the human race doesn’t seem interested in interacting with friends or neighbors is probably the cleverest.

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st Century in America” wrote Derek Thompson earlier this year in The Atlantic. “The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity.” Thompson’s essay rounds up the usual suspects—encroaching political conservatism, the lingering specter of Covid, the hypnotic thrall of smartphones, the strange pressurization of downtime by regular doses of dopamine—without necessarily taking anybody into custody. Trying to pin the global loneliness epidemic on a single culprit is a mug’s game, of course, but the fact that movies, mainstream and independent alike, seem reluctant to depict social relations except as a structuring absence hints that artists are aware of this lack of fellow feeling. Whether the pile-up of stories set in the middle of nowhere represents an attempt at diagnosis or capitulation is hard to say.