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There is something strangely satisfying about watching a movie where nobody is trying to save the world, solve a murder, win a war, or uncover a shocking secret. Sometimes people just sit around, walk around, clean things, drink coffee, have conversations, or stare into the distance while the clock keeps moving. These movies can feel almost aggressively uneventful, yet that is exactly what makes them work. They are not necessarily empty, and they are not always boring. They simply refuse to hurry toward a conventional story, giving everyday moments room to breathe. Reddit recently had plenty of suggestions for movies that embrace this wonderfully uneventful approach.
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Empire (1964)
Andy Warhol’s Empire takes the idea of nothing happening to an almost ridiculous extreme. The entire film consists of a fixed shot of the Empire State Building lasting more than eight hours, making watching it an endurance test as much as a movie experience.
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Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
The film spends extraordinary amounts of time watching Jeanne perform ordinary household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and washing dishes. The deliberate repetition makes everyday routines feel almost hypnotic, even when virtually nothing appears to be happening.
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Sleep (1963)
Another Andy Warhol experiment takes a remarkably simple premise and refuses to complicate it. The film shows poet John Giorno sleeping for more than five hours, turning one of the most uneventful human activities into the entire cinematic experience.
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Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
Jim Jarmusch’s collection of black and white conversations is built around people sitting together, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking about whatever happens to come up. There is rarely anywhere important for these conversations to go, and that is precisely the charm.
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Perfect Days (2023)
Hirayama spends his days cleaning public toilets in Tokyo, listening to music, reading, taking photographs, and following a remarkably consistent routine. The movie finds beauty in repetition and makes ordinary life feel quietly fascinating.
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Slacker (1990)
Richard Linklater’s film wanders through Austin without much interest in traditional storytelling. Characters appear, talk about strange ideas, wander away, and give way to someone else, creating the feeling of spending a day surrounded by completely random people.
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A Ghost Story (2017)
A man dies and remains in his house beneath a sheet, watching time pass around him. Long stretches contain almost no conventional action, yet the stillness becomes the entire point of the experience.
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My Dinner with Andre (1981)
Two men sit in a restaurant and talk for most of the movie. There is no chase, mystery, major revelation, or conventional cinematic spectacle, just an extraordinarily long dinner conversation that somehow keeps your attention.
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Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
There are no traditional characters and almost no conventional narrative in Koyaanisqatsi. Instead, the movie presents images of landscapes, cities, machines, crowds, and everyday life accompanied by Philip Glass’s hypnotic score.
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The Turin Horse (2011)
Béla Tarr builds an entire movie around repetitive daily routines involving a father, his daughter, and a horse. Meals are eaten, chores are performed, and the same actions recur with an almost unnerving persistence.
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Night on Earth (1991)
Five taxi rides across five cities form the entire structure of Jim Jarmusch’s film. The passengers and drivers mostly talk, joke, argue, and reveal pieces of their lives while the cars simply keep moving through the night.
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Paterson (2016)
A bus driver named Paterson follows the same routine every day, driving around town, writing poetry, walking his dog, and having small conversations. The movie turns repetition into something warm and quietly compelling.
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Taste of Cherry (1997)
A man drives around Tehran speaking with different passengers about an unusual personal request. The film moves slowly and spends much of its running time inside cars, letting conversations and silence carry the experience.
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Gerry (2002)
Two friends wander through a desert and become increasingly lost, with long stretches devoted simply to walking. Gus Van Sant strips the story down to movement, landscape, silence, and the uncomfortable feeling that nothing is happening quickly enough.
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L’Avventura (1960)
A disappearance occurs early in the film, but the movie becomes far more interested in the people left behind and the strange emotional drift that follows. Conversations, wandering, landscapes, and long silences gradually replace the mystery that initially seems like the main story.
The post 15 Movies Where Absolutely Nothing Happens, and That’s Ok appeared first on Den of Geek.
