It’s that time of the year again. Yes, first Christmas movie marathons and then comfort movie reruns, but also year-roundups and hits and misses. Looking back on the past year, identifying our achievements and failures often leads to regret and disappointment, which is why we prefer to watch something comfortable and familiar. Such movies provide some kind of resolution, a happy ending of sorts, which doesn’t exist in real life.
When thinking about the films we are watching at the end of this year, it seems audiences have a growing appetite for a different breed of cinema, which often includes unresolved characters, open endings, and grey characters. There are an increasing number of movies reflecting our shared hollow existence rather than promising the illusion of a happy-ever-after. A large chunk of the films released every year are about unresolved characters, ambiguous endings, and anti-heroes, even anti-climaxes. In fact, we now have Christmas films gravitating towards unresolved endings.
A Cultural Shift?
There is a growing kind of protagonist in contemporary cinema—one who is not chasing greatness, redemption, or even clarity. They are not “finding themselves” in the traditional sense. Instead, they are pausing, drifting, and hesitating. They exist in a strange space between who they were and who they might become. These are characters living in what can best be described as in-between lives.
Films like Past Lives (2023), Aftersun (2022), The Worst Person in the World (2021), All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023), and, in India, Laapataa Ladies (2023) are not about transformation in the grand, cinematic sense. They concern suspended states—emotional patterns in which life doesn’t progress smoothly, decisions are deferred, identities stay unresolved, and certainty feels both unavailable and unnecessary.
This is not an accident. It reflects a broader cultural moment in which traditional milestones—career stability, marriage, parenthood, retirement—no longer arrive on schedule, if they arrive at all. Now, cinema seems increasingly uninterested in tidy character arcs because real life has grown messier, slower, and far less linear.
Take The Worst Person in the World. Julie is not indecisive because she lacks ambition or intelligence; she is indecisive because the world offers too many choices and too few guarantees. Her drifting—from career to career, relationship to relationship—is not framed as failure but as a natural response to a culture obsessed with self-optimization. The film refuses to punish her uncertainty. Instead, it treats it as a condition of modern adulthood.
Similarly, Past Lives resists the temptation of dramatic resolution. Nora’s life is not about choosing between two men or two cultures, but about sitting with the quiet knowledge that every choice closes off another life she might have lived. The film understands longing as something that cannot be resolved into meaningfulness.
These films are not asking, “Who will this person become?” They are asking, “What does it mean to live while not knowing?”
Aftersun takes this idea further by portraying in-betweenness not as a phase but as a lifelong feeling. Calum, the father at the center of the film, exists in a permanent emotional in-between—between youth and responsibility, joy and depression, presence and disappearance. His life never forms into something legible or resolved, even in retrospect.
The film’s power lies in what it withholds. Calum is never fully explained to us, and that refusal is intentional. Not every life leaves behind clarity. Some leave only impressions, gestures, or fragments. In a cinematic landscape that often demands psychological exposition, Aftersun trusts ambiguity—and trusts the audience to sit with it.
Indian Cinema and the Quiet Politics of Delay
Indian cinema, too, is beginning to engage with in-between lives, particularly through women and marginalized characters. Laapataa Ladies, for instance, may appear light-hearted on the surface, but it is deeply invested in what it means for women to exist outside prescribed roles, even temporarily. The women at its center are not immediately liberated, nor are they entirely trapped. They are navigating a brief yet powerful shedding of societal expectations.
The Malayalam film Kaathal – The Core (2023) works on a similar level despite its nuanced and controversial storyline. We see a couple on the brink of separation after decades of being together, but it’s only much later that the layers of their decision begin to unravel. And that unraveling is slow, yet steady, providing much relief from the shocks and drama that films with separating couples often involve. That steadiness makes Kaathal an easy watch despite its firm stance on religion, politics, and human relationships.
What’s striking is that these stories do not rush to restore order. They allow their characters to linger in uncertainty—to learn, observe, and imagine alternatives without immediately acting on them. The beauty of the film lies in the discovery these women make while they are lost and later found. In a society that often demands decisiveness from women while denying them structural freedom, this pause becomes quietly radical.
A New Kind of Comfort Cinema
Films reflect our current societies. And collectively, we are all experiencing a radical shift in everything. The rise of in-between lives on screen mirrors global anxieties around work, identity, and self-worth. Many people today are living with unstable careers, shifting ambitions, and a growing discomfort with the notion that productivity equates with purpose. Burnout, underemployment, creative dissatisfaction, and emotional exhaustion have become shared experiences rather than individual failings.
Cinema is responding by rejecting the myth of constant forward motion. Instead of celebrating arrival, these films focus on duration—on what it feels like to exist within uncertainty for extended periods. They validate ‘being stuck’ not as laziness, but as survival.
There is also a subtle rejection of narrative capitalism at play here. These films resist the demand for “relatability” through success or redemption. Their characters are not inspirational in conventional ways. They are often unremarkable, unsure, and incomplete—and that is precisely their appeal.
What’s interesting is how comforting these films feel, despite their lack of resolution. Or perhaps because of it. There is a quiet relief in watching characters who are not rewarded for clarity or punished for confusion. In a world obsessed with self-branding and life hacks, these films offer permission to be unfinished.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, for example, unfolds more like a memory than a narrative. Time loops, fragments repeat, and emotional beats matter more than plot. It’s a film that understands life not as a sequence of turning points but as an accumulation of moments—some significant, others barely noticeable.
This approach asks viewers to slow down. It suggests that meaning is not always something we arrive at, but something we inhabit.
Perhaps the most radical idea these films offer is that not becoming anything—at least for now—is a legitimate state of being. They challenge the assumption that life must always be moving towards coherence, success, or self-actualisation.
Instead, they propose a softer truth: that people often live in flux, shaped by forces they don’t fully understand, responding rather than planning, surviving rather than conquering. And that this, too, deserves representation.
By embracing in-between lives, modern cinema does not abandon hope. It is redefining it. Hope, here, is not about arrival but about endurance—the ability to remain open, curious, and emotionally present even when the future feels unresolved.
In that sense, these films are not about waiting for life to begin. They insist that life is already happening, quietly, imperfectly, in the spaces we once thought were just transitions.
Essay Courtesy of Neha Jha
Feature Image Credit to ‘The Worst Person in the World’ NEON