By any conceivable measure, 2025 has been “an extraordinarily tough year,” a phrase that feels like it’s popped up in every year-end reflection since at least 2020. And while optimistic pop culture like James Gunn’s Superman has offered hope by looking on the bright side, a different and populous class of films has located their hope by looking on the negative. Sometimes the only way through is to stare directly into the void.
In other words, 2025 is the year of the depression movie—a different but not entirely unrelated phenomenon to this year’s rage-filled political satires (Eddington, One Battle After Another) and movies about personal grief (Hamnet, The Testament Of Ann Lee, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Twinless). Instead, these depression movies sit at the intersection of the personal and the socio-political. Bugonia‘s antihero deals with a deeply unfair world by kidnapping a pharmaceutical CEO. Jay Kelly is worried he’s sacrificed being a good person for a life of fame and fortune. Lady Mary’s post-divorce blues are heightened by the limitations of the 1930s’ upper-crust patriarchy. Even Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen can’t put out “Born In The U.S.A.” until he’s first locked himself away in a room to write Nebraska.
That fluid mix of personal and political is why many of this year’s depression movies are specifically about women, whose personal struggles are often tied up in broader social issues. Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is about a young mother’s experience with postpartum depression and psychosis. But it’s also about the way husbands fail their wives and the way communities struggle to support the women who need it most. Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace isn’t depressed about the patriarchy, but the patriarchy is one of the forces that contributes to her slow unraveling. Because Grace’s postpartum depression isn’t focused on hurting or neglecting her baby but on hurting and neglecting herself, everyone around her just acts like it isn’t happening.
It’s a film in conversation with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,“ in which a young mother goes insane after being confined to a room, barred from reading or writing in order to recover from an unnamed illness. As the narrator explains, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” Up until as recently as the early 20th century, it was common for all women’s mental health issues to be diagnosed as “hysteria,” a term rooted in the Greek word for uterus. It was 19th-century humanist writers like Perkins Gilman and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen who helped shift the cultural understanding of “hysterical” and “neurotic” women towards something more complex and empathetic. Fittingly, one of Ibsen’s most famous works got a cinematic update this year too.
For her take on Hedda Gabler, writer-director Nia DaCosta relocates the play to 1950s London, makes the lead character Afro-Latina, and gives the story a lesbian twist. At first glance, Hedda doesn’t seem like the most obvious depression movie, given that it’s mostly about Hedda (Tessa Thompson) wreaking calculated havoc among her husband’s university colleagues. But DaCosta and Thompson pointedly root Hedda’s manipulations in a sense of despair that lurks beneath her more obvious resentment at the limitations of her life as a woman who both craves and loathes convention.
While the original play doesn’t introduce suicide as a theme until quite late into its story, Hedda opens with its title character rushing out of a lake, dropping rocks from her pockets, after she hears that her ex-lover (Nina Hoss) is coming to the party she’s throwing that night. DaCosta suggests that part of the reason Hedda treats other people like her playthings is because she’s so detached from her own life nothing she’s doing feels real. And Thompson delivers career-best work as she takes lines that could be delivered as angry monologues or droll asides and fills them with a deep sadness. Whenever she finds herself alone at her party, Hedda nearly breaks down before steeling herself to cause more chaos instead.
Die My Love and Hedda fall in with 2025’s cohort of surreal feminist films like On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and 100 Nights Of Hero, which focus on women struggling to bear the logistical and emotional weight of patriarchal norms. But where those films are more focused on anger and rebellion, Die My Love and Hedda are more interested in sadness and self-harm. Indeed, one of the big innovations of this year’s slate of depression movies is their willingness to engage with suicidal ideation as a troubling but common human experience, not the sort of rare, scary thing that can only be discussed in hushed tones and after-school specials.
“If you want to kill yourself, with like a pencil or a knife or whatever, you can just tell me,” young college professor Agnes (Eva Victor) reassures a literal infant in Victor’s bittersweet indie Sorry, Baby. “I’ll never tell you you’re scaring me. I’ll just say, ‘Yeah, I know. It’s just like that sometimes.'” Where previous generations of feminine depression movies like Melancholia or Girl, Interrupted aimed to provide a sense of catharsis or resolution (at least on a metaphorical level), this year errs towards acceptance—in capturing the way dark emotions are sometimes just part of a life that can still be long and beautiful.
In fact, Sorry, Baby is specifically a film about how healing from trauma is a slow, maybe lifelong process—a struggle that’s often invisible to those outside of it and yet a rollercoaster for those inside. Rather than skip ahead to any climactic, cathartic moments, Sorry, Baby charts the quiet daily struggles and funny, unexpected highs of a woman who can only explain herself by saying, “Something pretty bad happened to me. So that’s probably why I’m acting weird.”
What this year’s depression movies understand is that there’s power to simply acknowledging that “it’s just like that sometimes” rather than trying to sugarcoat or downplay anything. Even Marvel made a movie where the main villain isn’t an alien god or an all-knowing robot, but the abstract concept of depression and suicidal ideation. Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts opens with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) standing on the ledge of a building, talking about the emptiness inside of her, and then jumping—only to eventually pull a parachute and add, “Or maybe I’m just bored.”
It’s a darkly funny opening the movie deploys not just as a joke but as a thematic statement of purpose. The ragtag “New Avengers” are antiheroes whose lives haven’t turned out the way they imagined they would. Instead of rendering that in splashy, superhero ways, the movie goes darkly realistic with its vignettes: Yelena in a drunken stupor on the bathroom floor, John Walker (Wyatt Russell) ignoring his young son because he’s too distracted obsessing over his bad press. When an enemy-turned-ally is shot in the head, Yelena can only deadpan, “She had a tough life. She killed a lot of people and then she got killed. Same as us someday.” As her adoptive father Alexei (David Harbour) puts it, “The light inside you is dim, even by Eastern European standards.”
The upside of that frankness is that 2025’s depression movies can be more honest about the solution too. Thunderbolts isn’t a movie about Yelena magically curing her depression, so much as learning to deal with it in healthier ways. Early in the film, Yelena only half-jokingly tells unstable test subject Bob (Lewis Pullman) that when he feels a void coming over him, he just needs to shove that feeling down. But after an emotional, empowering speech from her dad, she changes her mind. “You can’t stuff it down,” Yelena tells Bob in the movie’s climax. “You can’t hold it all alone. No one can. We have to let it out, we have to spend time together. And even if it doesn’t make the emptiness go away, I promise you it will feel lighter.”
A group hug saves the day in Thunderbolts, but so too does the idea of being truly seen. “When I look at you, I don’t see your mistakes,” Alexei tells Yelena. And while Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier isn’t quite so openly maudlin, his melancholy family drama Sentimental Value captures a similar feeling. Trier is also interested in a distant father (Stellan Skarsgård) who understands his depressed daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) more than she realizes. And befitting a movie about making movies, Trier is also interested in how art has the power to help us process things we can’t always say aloud. Sentimental Value is a depression movie about depression movies.
It’s also about a different kind of depression than the trauma-induced mental health issues of Sorry, Baby and Thunderbolts or the social pressures and chemical imbalances of Hedda and Die My Love. Like a house with a crack in the foundation, the tendency towards depression and suicidal ideation is a part of Nora—a trait inherited from one or perhaps both of her parents. The upside is she knows someone who has walked the path before and can maybe help her find her way out—like Alexei does for Yelena and Yelena does for Bob.
Even without that kind of mutual depression guide, however, this year’s depression movies find hope in the idea that those who haven’t shared the exact same experiences can still form incredible support systems. In so many of these female-led films, its women are attuned to one another’s moods; they see each other even as the men in their lives overlook their struggles. While it’s a skill that someone like Hedda uses for cruel manipulation, it’s a life raft for so many others. The chaotic confusion of Die My Love is counterbalanced by the lovely relationship between Grace and her mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek)—women who immediately understand each other’s loneliness, even if that alone isn’t necessarily enough to fix it.
Sentimental Value, meanwhile, is a sisterhood movie above all else, with Nora’s younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) serving as her emotional rock in a relationship that both embraces and subverts traditional older/younger sibling dynamics. Nora exists in a space between the high-functioning depressives of Thunderbolts and the full-on mania of Die My Love, but when she has to call out from work because she can’t function, Agnes is the one who comes over to clean her apartment and push her towards processing rather than retreating. There’s hope and growth in Nora’s complicated relationship with her father, but it’s Nora and Agnes who share the film’s truly unbreakable bond.
Sorry, Baby, similarly, is one of the best female friendship movies of the year, with Agnes and her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) sharing an off-kilter comedic banter that turns into a ride-or-die bond when it needs to. Where other people just “look really scared” when Agnes tells them about her experience, Lydie offers a sense of non-judgmental normalcy. Agnes can joke about suicidal ideation without scaring Lydie away, but Lydie is always carefully watching to make sure those jokes are just jokes. As with the sisters of Sentimental Value, there’s a deep sense of knowing that flows between the two women.
While it’s easy enough to spout “we can make it through hard things together” platitudes, this year’s best depression movies beautifully depict the sentiment in action. Even the least optimistic, Hedda, has an ambiguous ending that offers far more hope than the play. And for their part, Sentimental Value, Thunderbolts, Sorry, Baby, and even Die My Love walk a dark path not to wallow in the pain, but to try to illuminate it. Like Perkins Gilman and Ibsen did in the 19th century, these films bring an empathetic humanism to their complicated, underdiscussed mental health experiences—making private struggles a little more universal. Sometimes the best way to make it through an extraordinarily tough year is just to acknowledge that it’s been one.
