Film

Nocturne

Other titles called Nocturne: the 1946 film, the 2026 series (Apple TV).

A Dutch director on the eve of shooting his first film spirals through a feverish night hunting for inspiration, blurring the line between the story he wants to tell and the chaos of his own life. It's dreamlike and intimate, a portrait of creative paralysis rendered as an insomniac wandering. For anyone who's felt the weight of their own unfinished work.

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy films about artistic anxiety that let an unsettled, half-dreamed night wander without explaining itself, and you don't mind when the line between the director's plans and his life starts to blur.

Skip it if you need a story that moves forward, since this one stays inside one night of searching and rarely hands you a clear plot to lean on.

What it asks of you: Eighty minutes, mostly one long night, with a slow unhurried rhythm and a dreamlike, feverish texture; you'll need to let it wander and stay with its mood.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

La Haine1995

A restless, formally inventive portrait of young men adrift in Paris, moving between fury and comedy with the same fluidity. Like Nocturne, it captures the texture of a night as both literal and metaphorical—a clock ticking toward something unavoidable.

But The social context is specific to 1990s France, and the energy is harder-edged than introspective. If you want comfort, this isn't it.

La Haine poster

A Ghost Story2017

Achingly tender film about presence and absence, memory and creation. It holds time differently than you expect, asking what it means to leave something behind. The intimacy of watching someone sit with grief is overwhelming.

But It moves at its own pace, which is slow. The central image might test your patience before it breaks your heart.

A Ghost Story poster

First Reformed2018

A man at the end of his rope, wrestling with faith and failure in a single fevered stretch. Ethan Hawke's performance is a masterclass in barely-held-together desperation. Spiritually adjacent to Nocturne's night-of-the-soul structure.

But It's bleak and sometimes claustrophobic. Paul Schrader's vision doesn't offer easy catharsis or conventional comfort.

First Reformed poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Nocturne

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Synecdoche, New York2008

Both trap you inside the mind of someone trying to make art while their life comes apart, using the cinema itself as the language of psychological disintegration.

Charlie Kaufman's portrait of a theater director building a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse, unable to distinguish his art from his existence. It's the fever dream made literal, recursive and crushing and weirdly funny. If you loved Nocturne's collision of creation and chaos, this takes that premise into the abyss.

But It's formally audacious to the point of obscurity, with performances that deliberately resist emotional clarity. You may feel lost, frustrated, or convinced Kaufman is indulgent. You might be right.

Synecdoche, New York poster
More like this (7)

8½1963

Fellini's masterpiece about a director unable to finish his film, collapsing all his memories and fantasies onto the screen. The obvious reference point, and it earns it—visually rapturous and darkly funny about the terror of not knowing what you want to say.

But It's long, Italian cinema from the 1960s, and sometimes deliberately obscure. You need patience and a willingness to sit with ambiguity.

8½ poster

The Loneliest Planet2012

Julia Loktev's film about a couple trekking through the Caucasus, subtly fractured by a single moment. Like Nocturne, it's about how something unseen can reshape everything, told with remarkable restraint and visual grace.

But The story is buried beneath glacial pacing and landscape. If you want plot momentum, you'll find none.

The Loneliest Planet poster

Stalker1979

Tarkovsky's meditation on desire and the spaces between people, structured as a journey through a mysterious zone. Hypnotic and strange, it shares Nocturne's dreamlike logic and its sense that real life is stranger than fiction.

But It's slow, Russian, philosophical, and 163 minutes long. It asks more from you than most films dare.

Stalker poster

Inherent Vice2014

Paul Thomas Anderson's woozy 1970s noir follows a stoned detective through a night of unraveling mysteries. It captures the texture of half-remembered dreams and lost time, funny and sad in equal measure, with a creeping inevitability.

But The plot dissolves deliberately, the dialogue is sometimes inaudible, and Joaquin Phoenix's performance feels deliberately opaque. Clarity is not the goal.

Inherent Vice poster

Under the Skin2014

Jonathan Glazel's haunting, hypnotic film about an alien moving through Scotland. It's dreamlike and unsettling, more mood than narrative—Scarlett Johansson becomes almost abstract, a presence rather than a character you fully understand.

But It's oblique and slow, with minimal dialogue and long stretches of unexplained imagery. You have to be comfortable not being told what to think.

Under the Skin poster

Chungking Express1994

Wong Kar-wai's luminous film about loneliness and missed connection in Hong Kong, told as two intertwined night-stories. Visually intoxicating and deeply melancholy, it makes you feel the weight of small moments and invisible threads between people.

But The structure is fractured and the pacing deliberately elliptical. Some find it precious or mannered rather than moving.

Chungking Express poster

Possession1981

Both films map psychological states onto visual language, using the plasticity of cinema to render inner chaos as tangible reality. Both are about people whose minds are fracturing in real time.

Andrzej Żuławski's hallucinatory, grotesque film about a marriage unraveling in Berlin, where metaphor and reality blur into something genuinely alien and disturbing. It's operatic despair rendered in surreal horror—a fever dream with teeth. Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani are magnificent and terrifying.

But It's visually extreme, emotionally brutal, and will make you uncomfortable. There are images you won't unsee. It's not subtle and it isn't meant to be.

Possession poster

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