Six sliders. No stars.
Nothing on this site is recommended because people liked it. Films are described by what they are (how heavy, how fast, how far from the real world), and you get the ones closest to what you asked for.
Neither of these is the better film. They are just at opposite ends.
67 films tagged illness, showing 50
Move a slider to sort by what films are like.
2023 · Drama
A Black novelist whose careful books nobody buys writes, as a joke, the crude street story publishers keep asking him for. Half of it is that joke going too far, half is his family at home.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Drama
A therapist looks after a daughter who has to be fed through a tube at night, in a motel room, because the ceiling of their flat came down. Her husband is away at sea, her clients are a lot, and she is not sleeping.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2012 · Drama
An elderly Paris couple, both retired music teachers, are living quietly together when the wife has a stroke and her husband takes on her care. Almost all of it happens inside their apartment.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Drama
Two weeks before Christmas an elderly woman collapses at home, and her husband and four grown children gather at the hospital and the house. Family arguing, in rooms, for most of it.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
An American film director comes to Paris to work during Fashion Week, and is diagnosed with breast cancer while she is there. The film follows her through it.
AI estimate, not yet described
2010 · Animation
A family of four-inch people live under the floorboards of a country house, borrowing what they need, until the daughter is seen by the boy who has come to stay. Slow and quiet, with everything sized from her point of view.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Comedy
A London shop worker stealing to pay for her mother's treatment is filmed by the man who installed the store's security system, and he wants a partner for a Christmas robbery. Light, with snow on it.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Documentary
The poet Andrea Gibson tells their own story: childhood, working out who they were, their marriage to Megan Falley, and a terminal cancer diagnosis. A documentary, and much of it is Gibson talking.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A child is admitted to hospital with malnutrition on a court order, and his mother will not leave his side. It runs barely over seventy minutes and holds close to the two of them.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
Two stretches in the early life of the Galician figure Castelao: 1918, when he left a civil service desk to work as a doctor through the flu pandemic, and 1929, when he and his wife went to Brittany after losing their son.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Documentary
Three virus scientists who traced SARS to a bat cave in 2003, and warned that a worse one was coming, find themselves blamed for COVID when it arrives. Interviews, fieldwork and a lot of news footage.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Crime
A single mother with a sick daughter has until ten in the morning to find the rent, and every hour of the day makes it worse. It stays on her through one long stretch until she is out of options.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Horror
A woman caring for her comatose mother co-hosts a paranormal podcast as the sceptic, until an anonymous email arrives carrying ten recordings of a couple's nights. She is the only person on screen; everyone else is a voice.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Thriller
A twelve-year-old arrives at a water polo summer camp and buys his way into the popular group by joining in on the boy they have decided is diseased. Tense, mean, and all inside the camp.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A career thief breaks into a house in Kanyakumari and finds an old man with Alzheimer's chained to a window, who mistakes him for his son and offers him money to be let go. The two end up on a road trip, and the thief keeps finding reasons to stay.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Drama
The rise of Queen from a pub band to Live Aid, following Freddie Mercury from his first audition to the stadiums. Built around the songs, with the concerts staged at full length.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Thriller
One evening shift on an understaffed hospital ward, start to finish, with one nurse, one colleague and an intern between them covering every patient on the floor. It is ninety minutes and it never lets up.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
In a desert mining town in 1982 Chile, an eleven-year-old lives with her queer family as a deadly illness spreads, said to pass between two people the moment they fall in love. The town turns on them.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Romance
A woman looking for a spark in her life spends one whirlwind night with a man she has just met, then learns he is dying and decides to spend what time he has left with him. A romantic drama that takes its time.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
The director of a Paris nursing home tries to get her overworked staff to take up a gentler way of caring for people with dementia, and meets a Japanese playwright who is dying. Over three hours, and most of it is people talking.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
A gay actor in late-1980s New York, ill with AIDS, sets out to stage a play with his theatre group while his boyfriend looks after him at home. Much of it is the apartment, the rehearsals, and the people coming and going.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Musical
Sophie, sixteen, is rehearsing the lead in her school's production of Waitress when her mother's cancer comes back and turns terminal. It is a musical, and it plays out over the run-up to the show.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
A widowed village postwoman looks after her dying mother while her son, who says he is doing well in France, keeps his distance. His visit home brings his life as a drag queen into the village with him.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
An 18-year-old has to choose between looking after her mother, who has Alzheimer's, and getting on with her own life. A family drama that sits on that one choice.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
A professor calls the police on her step-father after finding him in bed with her mother, who has dementia, then moves home to look after her. It is slow and stays inside the family house.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Drama
The son of a famous heavyweight, who never knew him, turns up in Philadelphia and asks his father's old rival to train him. The usual boxing shape, with the fights shot in long unbroken takes.
AI estimate, not yet described
2016 · Action
A mercenary comes out of an experiment with powers he never asked for and goes after the man who did it to him, talking to the audience the whole way. Rude, fast, and joking through the violence.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2017 · Drama
The minister of a small, nearly empty church in upstate New York starts keeping a journal and agrees to counsel a young man who is frightened about the climate. Slow, quiet, mostly one man alone.
AI estimate, not yet described
2003 · Comedy
A young man in East Berlin whose mother sleeps through the fall of the Wall is told any shock could kill her, so he rebuilds the vanished country inside her flat. Gentle comedy with real history running behind it.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2023 · Drama
Three sisters who do not get on share a small New York apartment while their father is dying in the back bedroom. Almost entirely that one flat, and almost entirely the three of them talking.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2017 · Horror
A family lives sealed inside a house in the woods with strict rules about the doors, and then a second family asks to come in. Very quiet, very dark, and almost entirely in that house.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2022 · Drama
A buttoned-up London council clerk in 1953, going through the motions of a job he has done for decades, gets a diagnosis and starts trying to get one small thing built. Quiet, polite and very slow on purpose.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Action
An old Wolverine drives a limo near the Mexican border and hides a sick Professor X across it, until a girl with familiar habits needs taking north. A road movie, and much more violent than the ones before.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Drama
The conductor Leonard Bernstein and the actress Felicia Montealegre meet at a party and stay married for decades while he keeps a separate life going. Long scenes of the two of them talking, with whole years skipped between.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Drama
An ageing Spanish director in constant pain stops working and goes back through the people he left behind: his mother, a first love, an actor he fell out with. Slow and warm, and built out of memories.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2020 · Horror
A woman and her grown daughter drive out to the old family house when the grandmother goes missing, and she comes back with no idea where she has been. Slow, damp, and mostly three women in one house.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Horror
A young hospice nurse who has recently found God is sent to look after a former dancer dying at home, and decides the woman's soul is her responsibility. Small, quiet and very close to one person.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2002 · Drama
Two men meet at a Madrid clinic where each is sitting with a woman in a coma, and become friends over months of talking to them. Quiet and slow, in Spanish, and it goes to some uncomfortable places.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Comedy
A Pakistani-American stand-up comic is seeing a white grad student while his parents line up matches for him, and then she falls seriously ill. A lot of it is him in a hospital waiting room with her parents, who have only just met him.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Drama
A Chinese American writer flies to Changchun for a wedding the family has arranged so everyone can see her grandmother, who has not been told she is ill. Warm, awkward, and mostly meals.
AI estimate, not yet described
2020 · Drama
An old man in London keeps turning down the help his daughter arranges, and the film is put together from inside his head, so rooms and faces do not stay put. Almost all of it is one flat and two or three people talking.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Horror
A heart surgeon has taken a teenage boy under his wing, and the boy starts turning up wherever the surgeon's family happens to be. Everyone speaks flatly on purpose, and it builds slowly.
AI estimate, not yet described
2004 · Drama
Two Argentine friends set off up the length of South America on an old motorbike in 1952, one of them a medical student named Ernesto Guevara. Sunny and slow, mostly landscape and conversation.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2004 · Drama
A Spanish man who has been paralysed from the neck down for nearly thirty years fights in court for the right to end his life, from a bed in his brother's farmhouse. Slow, true, and mostly people talking in one room.
AI estimate, not yet described
2022 · Drama
A housebound English teacher who weighs 600 pounds spends one week trying to reach the daughter he left years ago, while teaching his online classes with the camera off. It never leaves his flat and is nearly all conversation.
AI estimate, not yet described
1995 · Science fiction
A convict is sent back from a ruined future to find the source of the plague that emptied the surface, and wakes up in a psychiatric ward instead. It jumps between times and asks you to keep track.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2015 · Documentary
The life of Amy Winehouse told through home video, voicemail and archive footage, from teenage demos to the last years. Built entirely from material shot at the time.
AI estimate, not yet described
2019 · Drama
A corporate defence lawyer takes a favour case for a West Virginia farmer and ends up spending twenty years suing a chemical company. Paperwork, depositions and a lot of waiting.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2022 · Science fiction
A woman given a terminal diagnosis commissions a clone to replace her for her family, then recovers and has to fight it in a legal duel. Flat, deadpan and very dry.
AI estimate, not yet described
2013 · Science fiction
A factory worker with five days to live tries to reach the orbital ring where the rich keep the medical machines. Grimy on the ground and spotless above it.
AI estimate, not yet described