The 20 best bottle movies

In some ways, My Dinner with Andre  is the ultimate bottle movie. Directed by Louis Malle, it stars Wallace Shawn and André Gregory as versions of themselves. What makes this film sparkle is how it uses the setting of a dinner table and two friends to ask larger questions about life, the universe, and everything in between. It doesn’t hurt that Shawn and Gregory make for delightful dinner companions, and one gets the feeling that they are watching two good friends. 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the most visionary filmmakers of his generation, and he brought his considerable skills to bear in the haunting The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Margit Carstensen portrays the title character and her various relationships with women. The entire film takes place in Petra’s apartment. It’s a haunting film, and the restricted setting gives Fassbinder, and his stars, the chance to really dive deeply into the tortured psyches of the various characters. Ultimately tragic and a little bitter, Petra wants nothing more than human connection, but this is too often the thing she can never attain.

M. Night Shyamalan is arguably best known for his twist endings, but in Knock at the Cabin, he delivers something slightly different: a tautly-woven disaster tale. Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge star as a gay couple who go to a remote cabin with their daughter, only to be accosted by a group of people who insist one of them must sacrifice themselves to save the world. The film does justice to the original novel, and the cabin setting gives the actors and characters a chance to reveal themselves, even as the world seems to fall apart beyond the confines of their little space of solitude.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives a remarkable performance in 10 Cloverfield Lane, in which she plays a young woman kidnapped and taken to a bunker by two men, played by John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr., who insist they’ve saved her life and that none of them can return to the surface. What follows is a claustrophobic and terrifying film, one with many unexpected twists and turns. Much of the film takes place in an underground location, which gives the entire affair a claustrophobic feeling. In this dangerous world, it’s not just the aliens who are to be feared.

The Terminal is the perfect meeting of director (Steven Spielberg) and actor (Tom Hanks). In the film Hanks stars as Viktor Navorski, who ends up stranded in an airport terminal due to a political crisis in his home country of  Krakozhia. The film is peak Spielberg, but it largely manages to steer clear of too much sentimentality. Instead, it draws human warmth and heart from Hanks’ performance, and the limited scope of the film’s setting allows it to focus to an extraordinary degree on the fundamental human warmth of all of its characters.

Released in 1982, Deathtrap  is based on the play of the same name. At the heart of the film are Michael Caine’s struggling playwright, Sidney Bruhl, and Christopher Reeve’s Clifford Anderson, Bruhl’s accomplice and lover. Most of the action takes place in Bruhl’s Long Island home, where he lives with his wife, who is driven to a fatal heart attack by her husband and his lover. As the film progresses, however, Bruhl and Anderson begin to turn against one another, and the result is a film that is, at times, scathingly funny and, at others, nail-bitingly suspenseful. 

Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn team up for Daddio, in which she plays a young woman, and he plays the cab driver who picks her up and takes her back to her apartment. Such is the skill of these two actors that their conversation, which proves remarkably wide-ranging and emotionally resonant, ends up captivating rather than merely repetitive. It is, at its root, a human story about two souls finding some measure of connection and, as such, reminds the viewer to embrace such moments whenever they might happen to arrive. 

Mass is one of those films that manages to make the most out of both a limited space and an extraordinarily talented cast. The film makes for harrowing viewing since it focuses on two sets of parents: one set has had their child killed in an act of gun violence, while the others are the parents of the killer. Thanks to performances from Reed Birney, Ann Dowd, Jason Isascs, and Martha Plimpton, the film engenders empathy from a premise that could have rested on empty platitudes and lazy storytelling. In this bottle movie, less is more.

David Fincher is in his element in the film Panic Room,  which focuses on a mother and child who retreat to their in-home panic room after their house is invaded. Jodie Foster is perfectly cast as Meg Altman, who will stop at nothing to protect her daughter. Fincher makes the most out of the constricted space of the film, which takes place entirely within the characters’ house, and uses both suspense and an encroaching sense of claustrophobia to allow his various characters to reveal aspects of themselves. 

The bottle narrative has repeatedly proved to be particularly well-suited to the thriller genre, and one of the underappreciated is Exam. In this film, a group of people are tasked with taking an exam to gain employment at a company, and, as the story goes on, the mysterious nature of the company, as well as several other mysteries, are revealed. Exam manages to be both quite suspenseful and also remarkably thought-provoking, making the most out of its limited sets and its bare-bones setup.

Most of the film Cast Away  takes place on a distant island, on which Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland finds himself alone on an island in the Pacific after a plane crash. He ends up spending four years there, and the limited scope of the setting — and his loneliness — is a chance for Hanks to once again showcase his considerable talents as an actor. Such is his star power, and so complex and rich is his characterization that the viewer doesn’t mind spending so much time with one character. In fact, it’s impossible not to sympathize with him. 

Quentin Tarantino brings his usual flash to The Hateful Eight, which focuses on a group of travelers who encounter one another during a snowstorm. It’s not long, though, before the past begins to bubble up and violence erupts, leading to chaos and bloodshed. Despite the fact that it takes place in a restricted space and clocks in at three hours, there’s still a lightness and a deftness to this film that sets it apart, and it should be regarded by many as one of Tarantino’s most artistically mature productions.

Kevin Smith has always had a keen directorial eye for producing weird comedies, and his feature debut, Clerks, is very much in keeping with his entire oeuvre. As its title suggests, it focuses on the employees of two stores and their friends. There’s an authenticity to Clerks that elevates it above the admittedly rather pedestrian nature of its narrative. As a result, it is the ideal reflection of a certain sort of ennui that had set in among Gen Xers during the middle of the 1990s.

What begins as a discussion between two sets of parents over an altercation between their children soon turns into a dark comedy of errors in Roman Polanski’s Carnage.  It features a remarkably talented cast, with heavy hitters Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, and Kate Winslet in the center roles. Though it never quite escapes the staginess of its production — it’s based on a play — Polanski nevertheless excels at using film to draw out some of the idiosyncrasies and darknesses that hide within even most seemingly normal people. 

It takes an extraordinary actor with a lot of screen presence to anchor a bottle film, and Tom Hardy is more than up to the task in Locke. He plays the title character, Ivan Locke, who spends the movie driving to the hospital where his mistress is giving birth while also engaging in conversations with everyone from coworkers to his soon-to-be former wife. The film gives Hardy plenty of time and space to flex his considerable acting muscles, and it’s largely thanks to him that this experiment succeeds. 

There’s a good reason that Alfred Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, and he brings his considerable cinematic gifts to bear in Rear Window. James Stewart stars as L.B. Jeffries, a photojournalist who witnesses a murder in the apartment across from him while incapacitated by a broken leg. What follows is a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with the murderer, and Hitchcock makes masterful use of the single setting to both create a sense of growing dread and to force the viewer to contend with the inherent voyeurism of the cinema.

As its title suggests, Clue is based on the board game of the same name, and the action takes place in a secluded mansion. It’s an uproariously funny film, thanks to the restricted setting, which ultimately poses no limit to the madcap antics that can take place and the performances. It’s stuffed to the gills with notable comic talents, including Madeline Kahn, Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Martin Mull, and Christopher Lloyd. Its alternate endings might have confused original viewers, but it’s since become a beloved cult classic. 

The Breakfast Club  is not just a perfect example of John Hughes’ cinematic style; it’s also a distillation of 1980s youth culture more generally. It stars some of the biggest young actors of the time, including Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and Emilio Estevez, who star as a group of high schoolers sentenced to detention. Its limited setting — it takes place in the school library — gives the actors a chance to really dig into their characters, and, as a result, the viewer comes to feel as if they know them and understand them in all of their complexity.

Henry Fonda gives one of his career-best performances in 12 Angry Men, where he plays one of the twelve title characters. What begins as a reasonably routine jury deliberation soon becomes something much more intense as the tensions among the men begin to mount, and the case becomes less clear-cut than many of them thought at the beginning. The claustrophobic setting ensures that both characters and viewer start to feel the pressure of the case itself, the justice system, their personal lives and personalities, and the roiling undercurrents of 1950s life.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Rope focuses on two young men — played by Farley Granger and John Dall — who murder their classmate and then host a dinner party with his body concealed in a chest. The action takes place exclusively in their apartment, and it’s heavily implied that the two men are lovers as well as murderers. It’s pure Hitchcock, with a tightly woven story that increases the tension by slow degrees, as Granger’s Phillip slowly loses his grip on the moment, particularly when the men’s old teacher, played by James Stewart, comes along and quickly figures out what they’ve done.