November Movie List

Halloween may be over, but doesn’t mean we have to stop engaging in spooky or cryptic stuff now, right? For the past several weeks, I’ve been having a movie marathon on weekends. The movies that I have watched and plan to watch, of course, are horror and mystery. I’ve been interested in stories about missing persons as of late as well.

Below are some of the movies that I have watched. Should you be interested in some mystery stories or wondering what to do for this weekend, I think you should give these movies a shot.

The Visit

Two siblings Becca (Olivia DeJounge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are sent to visit their grandparents, whom they haven’t seen for years, having a fallout with their mother (Kathryn Hahn). At first, everything seems normal, but as days go bay, the grandparents start to exhibit increasingly concerning behavior, like the grandfather suddenly yells at a random pedestrian and the grandmother wanders around the house erratically at night. One day, a woman visits the grandparents, but she’s never seen leaving the household, prompting the siblings to investigate the two elders.

Gothika

Therapist Dr. Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) gets sent into a psychiatric hospital where she works at after having been discovered murdering her husband, which she doesn’t remember doing. During her time at the hospital, she bonds with her former patient Chloe Sava (Penelope Cruz) who claims to be raped in the hospital. Miranda also begins to see an apparition in the form of a young woman, whose death may have something to do with her own situation.

The Forgotten

Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) is grieving about her son who died in a plane crash 14 months prior. Strangely, nobody, including her own husband, has memory of her son ever existing, having told that she’s never had a child to begin with. She later discovers a single physical evidence of her son’s existence and works with Ash (Dominic West) who lost his daughter in the same plane crash. While investigating what’s happening, they are targeted by a secret government organization and an unknown person, both seem to know about their children’s fates.

The Invasion

This film is an adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers. A space shuttle has crashed on Earth and released fungus-like alien lifeform that turns everyone into emotionless individuals with only one goal in mind; spreading their influence. A mother and psychiatrist Dr. Caroll Bennell (Nicole Kidman) journeys to collect her son Oliver (Jackson Bond) from her ex-husband Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) while avoiding being turned into a emotionless zombie herself.

10 Cloverfield Lane

A sequel to Cloverfield, this film follows a young girl Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) runs away from her fiancee and gets caught in a car crash. Upon waking up, she finds herself inside a bunker with Howard (John Goodman) who claims to be her rescuer and told her that the Earth is no longer habitable due to a cataclysmic disaster.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone

Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, the film revolves around a high school student Craig (Jaeden Martell), who befriends an elderly businessman Mr. John Harrigan (Donald Sutherland). Craig is hired to simply read for him three times a week until his final days. Not long after Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, Craig finds out that he still can contact him via a phone he snuck into his coffin. Strange accidents start to happen to the people Craig knows, making him wonder if Mr. Harrigan has something to do with these incidents and who he really was when he was still alive.

As for the following, these two are the movies that I plan to watch this weekend.

The Others

A mother (Nicole Kidman) and her two young children have suffered from a rare disease that makes them cannot be exposed to sunlight. Later, three servants arrive in their house and the family begin to experience strange and disturbing occurrences, ranging from disembodied voice emanates throughout the house, and the children begin seeing ghostly figures. Who are these servants and are they responsible for these supernatural phenomenons?

Passengers (2008)

Not the one starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, mind you. This one tells about a grief counselour (Anne Hathaway) who is assigned to conduct a therapy for a group of plane crash survivors. Some of these survivors tells contradicting stories regarding the crash with what the officials have told her. One of them (Patrick Wilson) also seems to know many things about Claire before they even met. As she begins to fall in love with this man, her patients start to go missing one by one. Who is this man and what happened to the other survivors?

I’m still looking for several movies with similar genre and themes to watch for the next few weeks. If you guys know films like these, particularly about missing persons, please do share. I love a good mystery story. In the meantime, have a nice weekend~