2005 · Joan Didion · 227 pages · Memoir
Didion's account of the year following her husband's sudden death is grief literature at its most precise, a writer of extraordinary control turning her analytical powers on the one experience that defies analysis.
2016 · Kenneth Lonergan · 137 min · Drama
Manchester by the Sea is a devastating portrait of grief that refuses to offer easy comfort. Casey Affleck's performance is one of the decade's finest, and Kenneth Lonergan's script understands that some wounds don't heal cleanly. It's not a film that gives you permission to feel better, and that honesty is exactly what makes it extraordinary.
1983 · Stephen King · 374 pages · Horror
Pet Sematary is Stephen King's most personal and most disturbing novel, a book he famously considered too dark to publish. It works because the horror isn't supernatural at its core. It's the horror of a parent confronting what they would do to undo the worst thing that could happen. The answer King provides is devastating.
2023 · Andrew Haigh · 105 min · Drama
All of Us Strangers is Andrew Haigh's devastatingly intimate film about a man who reconnects with his dead parents while falling in love for the first time. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal deliver performances of piercing vulnerability, creating a film about grief, loneliness, and the conversations we never got to have that lingers long after its final frame.
2022 · 3 Seasons · HBO · Comedy-Drama
Somebody Somewhere is one of the most emotionally honest shows HBO has ever produced, a three-season portrait of grief, friendship, and finding your people in the last place you expected. Bridget Everett anchors the whole thing with a performance that never reaches for sentiment it hasn't earned, and her chemistry with Jeff Hiller as Joel gives the show its beating heart. The deliberate pace and low-stakes storytelling won't work for everyone, and a few plotlines across the run feel undercooked. But for anyone who has ever felt stuck, out of place, or uncertain about where they belong, this show lands with quiet, lasting force.
2014 · 3 Seasons · HBO · Drama / Mystery
The Leftovers is one of the most emotionally powerful television shows ever made, a series that uses an impossible event as a lens for exploring grief, faith, and the desperate human need to make meaning from loss. The first season is heavy and challenging in ways that turn some viewers away. Seasons two and three represent a dramatic creative leap, delivering television so confident and emotionally devastating that it transforms the entire series into something extraordinary. This is a show that asks for patience and rewards it with an experience that stays with you long after the final episode ends.
2022 · Shelby Van Pelt · 355 pages · Fiction / Contemporary
Remarkably Bright Creatures stars the book-club era's most beloved narrator, Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus serving a life sentence at a small-town aquarium, whose sardonic captivity journal braids around widowed Tova Sullivan's night-shift cleaning and a thirty-year-old mystery about her drowned son. Shelby Van Pelt's debut became a word-of-mouth phenomenon on pure charm, grief and loneliness handled with a light touch, and an interspecies friendship that earns its sentiment. The human plot resolves on coincidences visible from open water and the octopus out-writes every biped in the book. Readers noted both and recommended it to their mothers anyway.
2017 · Martin McDonagh · 115 min · Dark Comedy Crime Drama
Three Billboards is a film powered entirely by its performances and a script that refuses to offer easy comfort about grief, justice, or who deserves redemption. McDormand delivers one of the great performances of the decade, and Rockwell matches her in a role that demands more than it appears to. The ending won't satisfy everyone, and the film's handling of race remains a legitimate point of criticism. But as an exercise in dark, funny, morally complicated filmmaking, it delivers far more than most.
2023 · 2 Seasons · Apple TV+ · Comedy
A warm, funny, emotionally generous comedy about a grieving therapist who starts telling his patients the truth, elevated by Jason Segel's vulnerability and Harrison Ford's scene-stealing grumpiness.
2024 · Jesse Eisenberg · 90 min · Comedy, Drama
A Real Pain is a deceptively small film that sneaks up on you emotionally, using the friction between two mismatched cousins to explore grief, guilt, and the uncomfortable comedy of being alive.
2014 · Don Hall, Chris Williams · 102 min · Animation, Action, Adventure
Big Hero 6 pairs an irresistible robot companion with a genuine exploration of grief, even if its superhero plot can't quite match its emotional ambitions.
2014 · Jennifer Kent · 94 min · Horror
The Babadook is a devastating psychological horror film that uses its monster as a vessel for grief and maternal anxiety. It won't satisfy anyone looking for conventional scares, but for audiences willing to sit with its discomfort, it delivers something far more unsettling than any jump scare could.
2015 · Stephan Morse · 374 pages · LitRPG / Science Fiction
Continue Online: Memories is one of the more unusual entries in the LitRPG genre, a book that cares far more about its protagonist's emotional state than his stat sheet. Morse wrote a character study disguised as a virtual reality adventure, and the result is something that sticks with readers long after they finish it. The slow opening and unconventional structure will lose some people, but for those willing to meet it on its own terms, this is LitRPG that actually has something to say about what it means to be human.
2023 · Ashley Poston · Fiction / Romance
The Seven Year Slip hands a grieving book publicist her late aunt's magical New York apartment, a home that occasionally slips seven years into the past, and lets her fall for the aspiring chef renting the second bedroom back then, a man whose present-day self she could meet any time she's brave enough to look. Ashley Poston runs the impossible premise as a grief novel wearing a romance's clothes, lemon pies and pistachio-sauce mornings against the ache of a life on pause. The magic follows feelings rather than rules and the middle idles a loop too long. The landing, when it comes, earns the tears it collects.
2017 · David Lowery · 92 min · Drama, Fantasy
A Ghost Story uses a bedsheet ghost and near-silence to explore grief, time, and impermanence with a quiet power that rewards viewers willing to sit in its stillness.
2024 · 1 Season · Amazon Prime Video · Drama
Lulu Wang crafts a visually gorgeous, emotionally precise portrait of three women unraveling in Hong Kong, with Nicole Kidman delivering her most restrained work in years, though the show's deliberate pacing will test the patience of viewers expecting conventional drama.
2019 · Ari Aster · 148 min · Folk Horror
Midsommar is one of the most visually distinctive horror films in years, built around Florence Pugh's extraordinary performance and Ari Aster's commitment to staging horror in unrelenting daylight. It's an unnerving film that works as both folk horror and grief drama, though its near-2.5-hour runtime tests patience and the pacing can be punishing. For viewers who can meet it on its own terms, it's unforgettable. For those who aren't, it's a very long afternoon.