The Cinema of Grief: Notes on a Decade
The most consistent artistic project in English-language cinema of the last decade has not been a movement or a style. It has been a subject: grief, treated with a specific patience that the previous decade did not allow.
I want to trace a specific tendency in English-language cinema of the last decade and argue that it is the most important project any of the contemporary filmmakers have been working on, despite its never being formally named or identified as a movement. The project is a specific treatment of grief, pursued by a specific cohort of directors, each working independently, producing films that recognise each other across their shared commitments.
The films I have in mind include: Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022), Kogonada’s After Yang (2021), Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021) and The Eternal Daughter (2022), Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023), Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023), Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017, adjacent), Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017, adjacent), and, arguably, much of the later work of Jim Jarmusch (Paterson, The Dead Don’t Die).
I am aware that this is a broad grouping. Different directors from different countries working in different languages. The cohort is not, in the technical sense, a school. But I think the commonalities are real, and they are worth naming.
What these films share
First, these films depict grief not as an event but as a condition. The death or loss that activates the grief happens, in most of these films, before the film begins or in a specific early scene. The rest of the film is not about the arrival of the grief but about the work of living inside it.
This is a significant departure from the default American cinematic grammar of loss. The default form stages the loss as the dramatic climax and treats the subsequent scenes as resolution. These films invert the structure. The loss is the setup. The subsequent life is the subject.
Aftersun is the clearest case. Calum’s depression and eventual disappearance are not depicted as dramatic events. They are the weather the adult Sophie is trying to understand, twenty years later, through specifically limited memories. The film’s entire 101 minutes are the processing of a grief that happened long before the film begins.
Second, these films use duration as part of their argument. Grief, as these films depict it, takes specific amounts of time to work through, and the films allocate their running time to match. This is connected to the long-film trend I wrote about elsewhere, but it is a separate claim. The running times of grief films do not need to be long in absolute terms (Past Lives is 106 minutes, Aftersun is 101, Moonlight is 111), but the way these films pace their scenes is specifically sitting. Characters are allowed to be in rooms without the film demanding they do something. The camera is allowed to watch them without cutting.
Third, these films are consistently interested in what memory does to the past. Many of them are structured as present-day characters returning to earlier material (literally, in Aftersun, where the adult Sophie watches home-video footage of the trip; literally in Hogg’s Souvenir films, which explicitly autobiographise the director’s own early-career grief; literally in All of Us Strangers, where the protagonist revisits his dead parents). The pattern suggests something about how the directors understand grief: as an ongoing conversation between the bereaved and the specific absent person, mediated through memory that is inevitably partial.
Why this cohort, why now
There are multiple causes, none of them sufficient on their own.
One cause is generational. The directors I have named were born, mostly, between 1965 and 1985. They have reached, in aggregate, the age at which specific parents are dying. They are, personally and contemporaneously, in grief. The films are, in many cases, processing actual bereavements the directors have sustained, and the processing is legible in the work.
Another cause is the COVID-19 pandemic, which for a specific period of 2020 and 2021 made grief the dominant shared experience of entire national publics. The films that arrived after the first pandemic year (After Yang in 2021, The Eternal Daughter in 2022, Aftersun in 2022, All of Us Strangers in 2023, Past Lives in 2023) landed into a moment when the audience was, in aggregate, primed to watch films about exactly this.
A third cause is the specific aesthetic permissions that the streaming-era prestige infrastructure has extended to this generation of filmmakers. These are films with relatively small budgets (most of them under $15 million), made for adult audiences, released either in limited theatrical windows or straight to prestige streaming. They are not commercially positioned to be mass events. They are positioned to be serious artistic works, and the financing infrastructure has, across this decade, been willing to fund them.
What the films are arguing
The substantive claim these films are collectively making, though none of them says it in so many words, is that grief is continuous with ordinary life rather than a discrete interruption. The bereaved character does not “get over” the loss and return to a previous state. The bereaved character integrates the loss into the ongoing texture of their life, and the ongoing texture becomes, specifically, a grieved texture.
This is a difficult claim to articulate in traditional dramatic grammar, because traditional drama requires conflict-and-resolution. A grief film in this mode refuses to resolve. The grief continues. The film ends. The person goes on living.
The argument, properly developed, is an argument for a specific kind of adult emotional life that commercial American cinema had, across the 2000s and early 2010s, largely stopped depicting. The default grammar was that problems get solved. Pains get processed. Losses get integrated. These films, reading the emotional texture of actual adult loss more honestly, are saying something different.
What I hope continues
The cohort is still working. Joanna Hogg has a new film in production. Charlotte Wells has confirmed her second feature. Celine Song’s Materialists (2025) is a slightly different film, not a grief film in this specific sense, but the sensibility is continuous. Kogonada’s next has been announced.
I hope the cohort continues to make these films. I hope, specifically, that younger filmmakers follow them. The specific attention these films pay to ordinary post-loss life is not a niche aesthetic interest. It is, I would argue, one of the most valuable things cinema currently does.
Watch Aftersun if you have not. Watch All of Us Strangers with a specific evening prepared for it. The films are doing something real. Let them.
Lena writes long-form essays on the films that will still be talked about in a decade. Previously at a defunct monthly whose name we do not speak.
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