film recommendations: late summer melancholy
"know it's for the better" movies to watch on a summer evening
We are officially into mid-August, which means it’s officially late summer. And the perfect way to celebrate late summer is by watching my favorite genre of film: melancholy, quietly stunning movies.
Usually, these are slice-of-life movies that are slow and work like character studies. The sadness and gravity of these films feel more fitting for a cold November night, but there is a breezy summer quality to it that creates a melancholic aura rather than an unequivocal gloominess. It’s a sort of sadness that creeps up on you after you watch it, but that somehow feels all the more devastating to me.
While I love the storylines in each of these movies, the cinematography is breathtaking in all of them. I love taking a whole evening to just savor and marvel and ruminate on the movie. Here are around 30 slow, quiet, melancholy movies fitting to watch in late summer! I tried to include a lot of underrated, lesser-known gems as well.
There are some that I am saving for my autumn film recommendations (Lady Bird, Before Sunrise etc), so stay tuned!
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Past Lives (2023)
dir. Celine Song
Nora and Hae Sung, two childhood friends, are reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life.
Past Lives is many things. It is wishful thinking, cautious hoping, and constantly reaching for the rewind button on the cassette. It evokes the rare feeling of a somewhat catastrophic nostalgia—the kind where you spiral on the what-ifs in your life, where you start wondering and missing the version of yourself you could have been like a phantom limb. Past Lives represents the moment when you see an illusion of a different you physically manifested in a person; the realization of the infinite possibilities contained within them that you will never see played out in real life.
Aftersun (2022)
dir. Charlotte Wells
Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between mini DV footage as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.
Aftersun is devastating. It’s a quiet sort of devastation that seeps into your bones like a slow-progressing frostbite—and you don’t realize just how calamitous it is until you finish the movie. The movie details a trip that Sophie and her father, Calum, took together to Turkey when she was eleven years old. The film is told through distorted fragments pieced together haphazardly; the story unfolds in hazy vignettes riddled with blind spots. It is emotional, hopeful, and gut-wrenching all at once.