10 great films to watch if you’re stuck indoors

What to watch when it’s too cold and icy to go out? Try It Follows, The Thing, The Fly, Roman Holiday, Up, Uncle Buck and more

The Fly: Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in David Cronenberg's 1986 horror film
The Fly: Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in David Cronenberg's 1986 horror film

What do you want to watch when the ice and snow come in and the winter skies darken before midafternoon? It’s traditionally the time for gathering around the fire for ghost stories. Seek out our five horrors (at least two with added snow) if you’re that way inclined. If you just want comfort, then enjoy our five warm hugs.

Five spine chillers

It Follows (2014, Netflix)

Maika Monroe, sporting bangs that Kim Novak might envy, channels every Alfred Hitchcock blonde as the besieged heroine of David Robert Mitchell’s horror. The highly decorated 2014 hit, scored through with Freudian dread and eerie electronica, is a fiendishly clever psychological horror about a sexually transmitted murderous ghost. Yes. You did read that correctly. Monroe is pursued slowly and relentlessly by a murderous demon that can take any human form and that only she can see. Her grim fate is sealed … unless she has consenting sex with someone else, and so passes on the curse to another victim. See it before They Follow: the long-awaited sequel which will shoot this year.

The Thing (1982, Apple, Prime Video)

Snowbound? Enjoy the cold-war-era, cabin-fever thrills of John Carpenter’s icy classic. A robust and rightly suspicious Kurt Russell is part of a doomed expedition trapped in a scientific outpost in Antarctica. Outside – and eventually inside – are shape-shifting monsters able to absorb and perfectly imitate any living being, including humans and, worse, the dog. One by one, the roughneck adventurers succumb. A masterclass in horror timing and uncanny special effects, The Thing teaches us that just because you’re not paranoid, it doesn’t mean the scary skinwalkers aren’t after you.

The Vigil (2019, Prime Video)

Yakov (Dave Davis) is a lapsed Orthodox Jew attending a support group for people who have recently left the Hasidic community when he is offered some paid work as a “shomer”; that is, to keep vigil over the recently deceased Mr Litvak. The Alzheimer’s-stricken widow immediately warns the young man to leave the premises. He doesn’t. Thus begins a long, creepy night of flickering lights, weird noises upstairs, fractured dreams, hallucinations and, just to seal the deal, a video playing in the basement in which the late Mr Litvak describes the ancient demon that attached itself to him at Buchenwald.

READ MORE

The Shining (1980, Apple, Prime Video)

It’s a disguised confession from Stanley Kubrick that he staged the moon landing for the US government. It’s about the genocide of the United States’ native population. Shelley Duvall’s Wendy imagines the entire horrific thing. Or maybe it all takes place in hell. No movie has attracted curveball analysis and conspiracy theories quite like Kubrick’s enduring horror. Jack Nicholson’s bruising patriarch relocates his cowed wife (Duvall) and anxious son to the remote, extremely haunted Overlook Hotel with terrifying and murderous consequences. Worst family holiday ever.

The Fly (1986, Disney+)

David Cronenberg, the godfather of body horror, reworked a 1950s B-picture about a hybrid human-fly creature into a drool-drenched nightmare. Jeff Goldblum is the unfortunate scientist who gets his DNA mixed up in a molecular-transportation experiment. Love interest and journalist Geena Davis watches in abject horror as he transforms into a vomiting, grotesque beast. Essential viewing for anyone who has ever wondered how long it takes to dissolve human flesh in fly spit or at what point during monstrous metamorphosis it is okay to dump your boyfriend.

Five warm hugs

Roman Holiday (1953, Prime Video)

If you wander around Rome today you will still see images of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck plastered about restaurants and cafes. At the time, just eight years after the second World War, this blissful romantic comedy must, particularly for European audiences, have seemed like the lifting of a weight. Hepburn, in her debut leading role, plays a visiting princess who hops over the palace wall while visiting the Eternal City. Peck is the (initially) cynical journalist who spies the material for a valuable scoop. They career about on Vespas. They eat ice cream. A closeness inevitably develops. For all the advance of budget flights and the globalisation of culture, this Rome still feels touchingly exotic. A summer holiday in January.

Mary Poppins (1964, Disney+)

Speaking of Audrey Hepburn, this is the film that allowed Julie Andrews to work quiet revenge on her Belgian rival. Hepburn was cast in the film My Fair Lady (available to stream on Paramount+) despite Andrews having originated the role of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway. The Englishwoman went on to beat Hepburn to the Oscar for her role in the most finely honed family entertainment of the 1960s. Fans of PL Travers’s source novels will forever gripe about the faithfulness of the adaptation, but Disney then knew how to work rich characterisation in with wholesome comedy and gorgeous songs. Spoonful of Sugar and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious are the best known, but nothing beats the gentle poignancy of Feed the Birds. Mary Poppins Returns, the largely forgotten 2018 sequel, is also on Disney+.

Up (2009, Disney+)

Twenty-first-century saloon bars have long been alive with debate about which is the best of Pixar’s animations. All of which are on Disney+. Both of the first two Toy Story films contend strongly. Wall-E has a gorgeous first half but gets overexcited towards the close. Pete Docter’s Up, however, comes close to qualifying as a perfect movie. The soul-wrenching sadness of the opening seems an odd choice for “warming” entertainment, but, though hanky dampening, the sequence stands as a proudly unapologetic tribute to the value of romantic love. The succeeding balloon-enabled journey that takes elderly Carl Fredricksen and bumbling boy scout Russell to the ends of the earth is funny, surreal and thrilling. Possible MVP: Dug the dog.

Paddington 2 (2017, Netflix)

Let us clear up one thing first. No, the glorious sequel to Paul King’s first Paddington fantasy did not, as much reported, topple Citizen Kane from Rotten Tomatoes’ list of greatest films ever. (The actual story is too boring to explain.) But if any cocoa-flavoured comfort food were to manage that feat then it may as well be this confirmation – see also The Godfather Part II and Bride of Frankenstein – that the sequel does sometimes improve on the original. It helps that the additions to the cast are so splendid. Hugh Grant opened up a whole new act of his career with the lovey villain Phoenix Buchanan. Brendan Gleeson found new ways to pronounce “baguette” as the prison chef Knuckles McGinty.

Uncle Buck (1989, Prime Video)

Surly older teen girl: “I’m not going bowling!” Dissolute housesitting Uncle Buck: “Hey, it’s a great sport and it’s almost impossible to get pregnant while doing it.” Of course John Hughes’ film leans towards sentimentality, but John Candy’s performance as the vast loser taking care of his brother’s children is one for the ages. The satire in the director’s takes on suburban Chicago is generally so wan it barely registers. Though the film admires Buck’s free spirit, it does ultimately want him to settle down with Amy Madigan. So what? Predictably strong juvenile support from Macaulay Culkin and a standout cameo from Laurie Metcalf as a sexually rapacious neighbour. Actual snowy Candy is available on Prime in the equally strong Planes, Trains and Automobiles.