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20. Cars (2006)
Just so we’re all clear on the brief, tomorrow is Halloween. But some people do not like scary films. Some people do not like films where there are any intense emotional moments whatsoever. This is mostly a list of those films. So, for example, Up cannot be included in the lineup because its first 10 minutes are genuinely traumatising. Similarly, Finding Nemo cannot be included because it is a film about a grief-stricken father searching for a son he believes might be dead. But Cars, a film about some cars, can. The scariest that Cars gets is when a car has a near-miss with a train. Other than that, barely any jeopardy at all.
19. My Dinner With Andre (1981)
However, this isn’t to say that all these films have to be for children. If you’re looking to keep your heartbeat at a consistently low thud, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre fits the bill perfectly. Though rated 12, for infrequent moderate sex references, it’s fair to say that nothing at all happens here. Two men have dinner and talk a lot, and then it ends. A small army of viewers are quick to call My Dinner with Andre the most boring film ever made. It isn’t – a kinder read would be to call it deliberately cerebral – but nothing about it will keep you up at night.
18. Curious George (2006)
This adaptation of the classic children’s books (the first of which was published in 1941), about a pleasant chimpanzee getting into moderate scrapes, is nothing if not relentlessly charming. Will Ferrell plays a man who seeks to discover a hidden treasure in order to raise funds to save a museum, and a monkey follows him around. Unless you are extremely disturbed by scenes of paint being flung, this is one of the most happily inoffensive films ever made.
17. In the Mood for Love (2000)
On the surface, the films of Wong Kar-wai seem perfect for this list, since they all tend to move in a dreamily hypnotic state. However, he does seem to like to inject them with intermittent violence. There’s a car crash in My Blueberry Nights, for example, and a stabbing in Days of Being Wild. In the Mood for Love, on the other hand, is far more sedate. Two people are brought together after learning that their partners cheated on them with each other, and the result is this mournfully peaceful story. The trigger warning website Does the Dog Die? states that food gets eaten rather loudly in one scene, though, so watch out for that.
16. The Red Turtle (2016)
I desperately wanted to include the Latvian animation Flow in this list, until I remembered how badly it freaked out my eight-year-old. More sedate is Michaël Dudok de Wit’s similarly dialogue-free The Red Turtle. A man is stranded on a beach, his chances of escape thwarted by a turtle. Although – and here comes the only remotely frightening part – the turtle dies, it is reincarnated as a woman who falls in love with the man. Extremely touching and truly beautiful.
15. On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)
The work of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo could have filled this list from top to bottom, since he specialises in quietly meditative films where barely anything happens. However, his standout is still On the Beach at Night Alone, in which a Korean woman runs away to Germany after the end of an affair. The premise makes the film sound far more action-packed than it is, because in reality the most shocking thing that happens is that the main character raises her voice once. But the lack of tangible plot is the point. This is a film made to wash over you.
14. Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Compared with On the Beach at Night Alone, Everybody Wants Some!! is as action-packed as a Transformers movie. There are drugs, parties and repeated mentions of masturbation. But still, this is a Richard Linklater film, so it’s important to state that very little happens. For the most part, the film is just a loose collection of fun scenes comprising college baseball players hanging out and goofing off. With maybe one exception, this is as fast as your heart will beat in the entire list, but that isn’t really saying much.
13. Le Quattro Volte (2010)
Philip French called Michelangelo Frammartino’s film “an essay, a cinematic poem, a spiritual exploration of time and space” – and it’s hard to find fault in that description. Le Quattro Volte is a film about an elderly goatherd in the Calabrian mountains, who quietly goes about his business in a calm and unhurried manner. It might be worth stating that this is ultimately a film about death – it’s sad but not scary – but for the most part this near-silent meditation feels like a long, slow exhalation.
12. Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)
The legacy of Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a million Netflix documentaries where chefs are treated with far more reverence than they deserve, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a masterpiece. Jiro Ono owns a 10-seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station, but his quiet focus and dedication to perfection mean that it has won three Michelin stars. The joy of the film comes from the loving, trance-like scenes of Jiro preparing his food with a monastic stillness. It cannot be called a truly soothing movie, because the guy is mean to his son, but other than that it fits the bill perfectly.
11. The Peanuts Movie (2015)
The danger, when it comes to adapting a beloved children’s character for modern audiences, is that there’s a tendency to go full Peter Rabbit and fill it with horrifying poop gags that sully the charm of the original. There is none of this in The Peanuts Movie, which is as sincerely good-natured as any film could be. Charlie Brown harbours a crush on a redheaded girl in his class, and embarks on various methods of self-improvement so that she might notice him. It’s perfectly in step with Charles M Schulz’s comic strip and has such a lightness of touch that you’d have to be a monster not to adore it.
10. Before Sunset (2004)
Despite his ever-expanding sense of ambition (he is now adapting Merrily We Roll Along, filming over 20 years, with an eye to release in 2040) Richard Linklater’s masterpiece will always be the Before series, where we intermittently check in with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy across the various stages of their relationship. Although 1995’s Before Sunrise landed with the most impact – Hawke and Delpy are young, sexy and flirtatious, and we get to watch them fall in love in real-time – Before Sunset is the heart of the trilogy. The pair are older and a little more bruised, and life has become more complicated. But it’s still a gorgeous, low-stakes, definitively unscary film.
9. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
Does the Dog Die? has an absolute field day with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s languorous fantasy drama. Yes, this is explicitly a film about ghosts, but the site points out that they are “friendly spirits” and “not jumpscare ghosts”. And yes, there is also sexual content in the form of a scene where it is implied that a woman has intercourse with a fish, but “it somehow isn’t as disgusting as it sounds”. In truth, it is harder to justify the inclusion of this film than any other on the list, but the overwhelming tone is so soft and slow that it fits the bill.
8. Playtime (1967)
Jacques Tati’s masterpiece isn’t so much a film as an opportunity to marvel at his incredible production design; he built an entire city, Tativille, on the outskirts of Paris to make it. A procession of blink-and-you’ll miss it visual jokes, set in a stylish if sterile vision of modernity, Playtime has no real plot to speak of. Tati, dressed as his baffled Monsieur Hulot character, drifts through scenes more as an onlooker than an active participant, as the world goes about its business around him. Nevertheless, it’s a film that you will find yourself getting lost in time and time again.
7. The Straight Story (1999)
Few David Lynch films could comfortably fit into a list of unscary movies – stick a pin anywhere in his oeuvre and it’s likely to land on something that will psychologically terrorise you forever – but The Straight Story is his outlier. An old man (Richard Farnsworth) drives a tractor across middle America to visit his dying brother (Harry Dean Stanton), and that’s it. Rated U upon release, there is nothing to trouble even the most sensitive of viewers here, with the possible exception of an offscreen car crash. Nevertheless, the humour and emotion that Lynch crams into such a slight story is extraordinary. One of his finest.
6. Paterson (2016)
Jim Jarmusch’s best film, Adam Driver’s best film and almost certainly the best film ever made about the act of carefully redrafting a poem while simultaneously driving a bus. Paterson is an extraordinary movie with the slightest of premises. That is literally all that happens; Driver writes a poem, then changes it as he drives his bus around town, then the same thing happens the next day, and the day after. There are, admittedly, spikes in tension here and there – a guy pulls a fake gun at one point, and his wife is so relentlessly whimsical that it’ll put your teeth on edge – but for the most part this is simply a film about a man quietly going about his day.
5. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019)
Especially compared with the other, far more languid, films on the list, Farmaggedon can feel a little bit like you’re being trapped in a shedful of exploding fireworks. But this is as joyful as film-making can be, and there is cross-generational appeal here. Shaun the Sheep finds an alien in his quiet small town, and decides to help it return home. The premise is just an excuse to deliver gags based on hoary old sci-fi tropes, but the scene that pushes Farmageddon into masterpiece territory is a near-scientific demonstration of what happens if you let a hyperactive alien ingest too much sugar. This may be heresy to some, but I’d bat for this as Aardman’s finest work.
4. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2021)
In these troubled times for cinema, where not even huge tentpoles can be guaranteed to make money any more, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On was a baffling thing to release theatrically. A quiet stop-motion animation about a shell who sort of ambiently potters about the place, the film is just about as niche as it gets. While it is very funny and sweet – Marcel is the sort of character you yearn to protect – there’s a melancholy undertow to the film that may catch you off-guard. But this is a list of films that aren’t scary, not films that aren’t sad, so it counts.
3. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
“Very mild comic violence is unlikely to upset even the youngest children” is how the BBFC describes the classic music comedy, and anecdotally this is accurate. I had worried that Donald O’Connor’s aggressive slapstick in the Make ’Em Laugh sequence would be too much for my kids when they were very young – you are essentially watching a man injure himself for applause – but it turned out to be their favourite part. As films about the death of the silent movie experience go, this is vastly more palatable than Babylon (which, let’s not forget, included a scene of an elephant crapping directly at the audience).
2. Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
Many parents will have experienced the horror of leaping into a family screening of a Studio Ghibli film without proper research – I cannot be the only person to have abandoned Pom Poko after all the dead racoons made the children leave the room – but Kiki’s Delivery Service is the safest bet in town. A film about a young witch who decides to work as a courier, the film is relentlessly delightful. I was going to say that there isn’t a person on the planet who wouldn’t fall in love with Kiki’s Delivery Service, but I just looked on Does the Dog Die? and there’s a trigger warning because it contains a body of water, so who knows?
1. Perfect Days (2023)
A film about a man silently cleaning toilets for two hours has no right to be as beautiful as Wim Wenders’s 2023 film, and yet it manages to be staggering. Kōji Yakusho wakes up, gets dressed, cleans toilets, eats lunch, goes home and dreams, over and over again. The result is the best film about quiet contentment that has ever been made. It helps that the public toilets are genuinely works of art – you wonder how many holidays have been booked to Tokyo purely to visit them – but this is a film about a man experiencing everything as if for the first time. Nature, people, music, peace … it is so meditatively zen that you’ll want to watch it once a month to reset your nervous system.
