Where do we look for solace in these dark, anxious times? Sometimes, the answer is at the cinema

Dispatches from Dystopia is a monthly column by Peter Knegt that engages with culture and community even as the world appears to be crumbling around us. This is its first edition.

It has never felt like a more imperative time to take extra care of our poor brains. For me, just checking the news can feel like being pelted with grenades of anxiety-inducing information. Whenever I've picked my phone up over the past few weeks, it's felt like I'm handing my neurotransmitters a very legitimate reason to panic, and personally I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to keep myself from spiralling.

My mental-health game plan through last year's U.S. election cycle had originally been to moderate my news intake as much as possible. But in the weeks leading up to the election, I became a full-on junkie. I watched The View every day and MSNBC until 2 a.m. every night. I'd devour the seemingly hundreds of hours that Pod Save America released every week. I'd check for new polls every other minute, treating the information like gospel. And for a moment, I even let my coconut-pilled self indulge in a kind of precarious hope that is very dangerous for a nervous boy like me (or for any of us, really): that through "the system" things might just be OK after all.

Well, it's now extremely clear that things will not be OK after all, and I know I'm not alone when I say that I have not been taking it well. Being in a state of perpetual existential dread is certainly nothing new for most of us, but these last few months have felt pretty unprecedented. It doesn't just feel like the bad guys are winning; it feels like they've won. And considering everything from their dismantling of LGBTQ rights to their denial of climate change to whatever chaos their mishandlings of international politics and A.I. will bring, it is getting real hard not to succumb to the full-fledged dystopian pessimism of it all. I don't know about you, but this has really forced me to overhaul my strategy for (barely) getting through the day-to-day.

I am not a religious man. But in these dark times, it seems I have turned to the closest thing I have to a place of worship: the movie theatre. The night after the election last fall, I decided to resist the urge to down a magnum of wine at home while staying up watching unhinged panels debate how this all happened (and believe me, the urge was there). Instead, I found my way to an advance screening of the film Nickel Boys. Sitting still in the dark with my phone off while engaging with a challenging piece of cinema felt like the opposite of what my impulses desired (sending manic texts of doom while watching Rachel Maddow lose her mind), but I knew it was exactly the nourishment my rattled soul needed.

An adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Nickel Boys follows two Black teenagers who are sent to a malevolent reform school in 1960s Florida. Director RaMell Ross has been rightfully lauded for the film's unique use of first-person point of view, which literally puts audiences in the perspective of the protagonist as he suffers through horrifying abuse. As one can imagine, this does not make for easy viewing. But it does embolden the viewer with some pretty profound empathy, particularly as a collective experience with a few hundred other people in a movie theatre. And collective empathy is perhaps the thing this world needs more of above all else.

Walking home from Nickel Boys that night, tears still streaming down my face from the film's harrowing final act, I committed myself to taking a path through the chaos ahead that was uncharacteristic of my past behaviour. After the 2016 U.S. election or at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, my tactics could generally be classified as either self-destruction or numbing out (or both at the same time), and I knew my aging brain and body simply weren't up for another round of that. What I needed instead was strength and renewal, and reminders that there still is good in this world. And while I certainly didn't think going to the movies was some overarching solution to all this, I did know it was going to be a part of it. 

November is a horrible time for almost everything, but it's a great time to go to the movies. It's basically the beginning of a three-month period where 90 per cent of the films actually worth seeing get released, primarily because it's when they can capitalize on awards season. (Nickel Boys, for example, was just very deservedly nominated for an Oscar for best picture … and it's still in some theatres now, so do go see it if you can!) So instead of spending my nights spinning out to the dread of the news, I spent them at the movies — a place where, if you are behaving (which you should be), your phones are tucked away on "do not disturb" mode, unable to do any harm.  

According to my Letterboxd (the only sane form of social media left!), I saw exactly 50 movies between election night and last week's inauguration, including some exceptional offerings of understanding and perspective: Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, a lacerating portrait of a deeply damaged woman struggling to simply exist; Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, a beautiful celebration of life despite being a story of a woman facing death; Walter Salles's I'm Still Here, which offers chilling insight into one woman's heroism during the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil; Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a truly revolutionary rallying cry against the current Iranian regime that literally had to be made in secret. 

There were also older movies. One of the many wonderful things about movies is that it is essentially impossible to run out of worthwhile viewing options, and one of the few wonderful things about living in the city of Toronto is that it has an incredible repertory cinema scene. I was very grateful to the TIFF Lightbox for closing out the last two months of 2024 with a retrospective of every single Pedro Almodóvar feature, allowing me to be transported to the warmth of a hyper-saturated Spain for several of early winter's darkest nights. And on the particularly grim night that followed the inauguration, I was gifted a reminder that America was, in many ways, as full of despair and hopelessness and horrible men 20 years ago as it is now when I took in the three-hour-plus extended cut of Kenneth Lonergan's staggering Margaret at the Paradise Theatre (be careful trying this at home though, because it truly is as bleak as they say).

But the most viscerally human experience I had in any cinema during these past few horrible months was a little unexpected. That's because it came via Flow: a dialogueless film about a cat. A riveting work of animation (which just became the first Latvian film to be nominated for an Academy Award) from director Gints Zilbalodis, Flow follows said cat as it assembles a chosen family of other animals so they can try and survive a giant flood together. And somehow, the wordless journey of these animals feels like it has more to say about what it means to be alive during these catastrophic times than anything I've seen recently starring actual humans. 

Essentially, Flow is telling us something that I think we all need to make our guiding principle going forward: if we want to make it through all this, we must build community and we must take care of one another. And this is maybe the best thing movies can offer us. At times when things feel impossible, movies don't just comfort us with the reminder that we're not alone, but can reorient us to what really matters, recharge our belief in what's possible, inspire us to persevere. The heartbreak we feel for the world might not quite feel good in a place like this. But a few hours in a movie theatre can send us back out into the world a little less heartbroken and a little more ready to make it a better place.