With the season of ice cream, sun loungers, and ‘out of office’ messages underway, we take a look at the best summer getaway movies of the 21st century.
Travel has been a staple of filmmaking for about as long as the moving image has existed, an early example being the Lumières’ famous train pulling into the station in 1896. But from the mid-20th century, as tourism grew in ubiquity and affordability, we saw a rise in the number of cinematic depictions not only of exploration, business trips and foreign combat, but the more humble leisurely holiday, too.
Films like Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude (1951) and Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969) began to explore the summer getaway as a theatre for coming of age, sexuality and socio-economic examination, while National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) would start a major franchise and a style of comedy that remains imitated to this day.
Nowadays, what may once have been the journey of a lifetime is an (at least) annual occurrence for many. So what does cinema have to say about the age of Ryanair, Airbnb and data roaming? Let’s find out by rolling out the beach towels, donning our sunglasses, and watching the best summer getaway movies of the 21st century, ranked alphabetically.
1. A Bigger Splash (2015)
Loosely based on the aforementioned Deray classic, the second entry in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire’ trilogy takes us to the Italian island of Pantelleria. Tilda Swinton’s rockstar Marianne is recovering from throat surgery in a remote villa with her partner, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), when their idyll is disturbed by the unanticipated appearance of her ex-lover, Harry (Ralph Fiennes). The music producer’s extroverted personality and bacchanalian lifestyle are abrasive at first, yet Marianne can’t help but be charmed again.
The only thing more glamorous than the sumptuously shot location is its cast, chiefly Dakota Johnson as Harry’s seductive daughter, the older characters powerless to the orbit of her youth. It’s great to see Fiennes really let loose as a sort of Machiavellian Austin Powers, with Swinton’s almost wordless turn as Marianne a perfect counterbalance: her body language majestically communicates the unspoken depths of her character’s desire.
2. Aftersun (2022)
Charlotte Wells’s immaculate debut feature transports us to a sundrenched resort in ‘90s Turkey, recounting a memorable holiday that Sophie (played by Frankie Corio as a child, Celia Rowlson-Hall as an adult) spent with her young father, Callum (Paul Mescal). For much of the film, our job is simply to revel in the nostalgia and innocence of those childhood holidays, seeing the world through Sophie’s eyes, or rather the camcorder she carries around throughout the trip. This device is a novel entryway into the themes of memory and childhood weaved into the film, evoking the feelings of carefree youthful summers while smartly obscuring a tension that swells until its emotional denouement. Corio and Mescal are outstanding in this film that begins, like all summer getaways, full of airy optimism, but ends in more disquieting psychological territory.
3. Before Midnight (2013)
The final chapter of Richard Linklater’s fêted Before trilogy swaps the city streets of its previous entries for the more traditional family holiday in stunning rural Greece, an inspired choice for a film that reckons with the ageing of its characters and the consequential dissolution of their adventurous romanticism. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is a renowned author, having fictionalised his first encounter with his now-wife Céline (Julie Delpy) to great success, but 18 years later, their real-life marriage is an entirely different beast. Some will find the film’s cynicism depressing, but only because of its familiarity. What couple hasn’t had a nasty row or two after spending the past couple of weeks dragging the kids around southern Europe in a poorly air-conditioned rental car? It’s as honest a depiction of love after the honeymoon period as you’re likely to see.
4. Everyone Else (2009)
Seven years before Toni Erdmann, German cineaste Maren Ade won the Silver Bear at Berlin with her tragicomic study of a relationship on the brink. It sees the effervescent Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and her dour boyfriend Chris (Lars Eidinger) soak up the Sardinian sun in the latter’s family villa. Gitti’s playful extroversion clashes against the anxiety and self-seriousness of her partner, a struggling architect whose disappointments are made all the more palpable when the couple bumps into his more successful peer (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and his pregnant wife (Nicole Marischka).
It’s not just professional jealousy at play here: this seemingly perfect, ‘normal’, marriage is a sober reminder of what is missing in Gitti and Chris’ relationship, something they may have wished to obscure with the temporary luxuries of their escape abroad. Ade’s film masterfully captures the summer getaway as a locus of introspection and reinvention, with all the awkwardness and vulnerability that entails.
5. How to Have Sex (2023)
Now we hop on a budget airline flight to Malia, the infamous Greek resort town on which scores of young British tourists descend for their dose of summer shenanigans. How to Have Sex subverts the comical ‘lads on tour’ depiction of the location as seen in 2011’s The Inbetweeners Movie, making for a sobering account of a full-throttle party holiday from the point of view of three young women. Director Molly Manning Walker captures with an impressive eye for detail the aesthetic and atmosphere of this modern rite of passage, and she and her lead Mia McKenna-Bruce, playing the spritely Tara who is insecure about still being a virgin, take us on such a joyful thrill ride that it’s all the more devastating when everything goes wrong. A painful but essential portrait of innocence, adolescence and toxic masculinity.
6. La Ciénaga (2001)
You know that feeling you get on holiday when time stops existing and you can’t quite remember what day it is? This is that sensation in a film. Scenes begin and end without any logic or structure. Characters appear and disappear unacknowledged. You think you’ve figured out who’s related to whom and how, and then your brain gets scrambled again. In La Ciénaga, a middle-class family escapes the heat of the city, taking refuge in their poorly maintained country home. It’s clear the fortunes of Mecha (Graciela Borges) and her husband Gregorio (Martín Adjemián) are in decline, but their nonchalant children are oblivious amidst the suffocating humidity of the Argentine summer. Be it the deteriorating house, stagnant pool, or various injuries suffered by its characters, everything and everyone is falling apart in this allegory of moral decay and bourgeois conceit.
7. The Lost Daughter (2021)
In the first English-language adaptation of an Elena Ferrante text, the inimitable Olivia Colman plays Leda, an academic and translator on a solo break in Greece. When the daughter of young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) goes missing, she helps to find her, but steals the girl’s favourite doll. Sitting in a cupboard in Leda’s rented apartment, the toy and the capricious act of cruelty it represents loom over the rest of her stay. She takes great interest in Nina’s parenting struggles, and it’s hard to say if she does so with empathy or schadenfreude, inscrutable as she is. It’s only through flashbacks to her own early years as a mother, where the same character is played by Jessie Buckley, that we learn of more than one ‘lost daughter’ in this anxiety-laden tale of self-determination and female rage. It’s all anchored by Colman’s exquisitely raw performance, quite possibly a career best.
8. Swimming Pool (2003)
In this archetypal François Ozon psychosexual thriller, we join mystery author Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) as she attempts to cure her writer’s block at a publisher’s country house in the south of France. This idyllic poolside getaway is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), who claims to be the homeowner’s daughter. Making herself right at home, Julie engages in various one night stands with men of the local village, an irritation for Sarah that evolves into a fascination and inspiration for her literary endeavours. This playful depiction of the creative process becomes increasingly metatextual as a tense love triangle forms and the plot begins to resemble one of the protagonist’s own crime novels.
9. Unrelated (2007)
Joanna Hogg’s first feature film takes place in balmy Tuscany, telling a loosely plotted story about childless forty-something Anna (Kathryn Worth), who joins friend Verena (Mary Roscoe) and her extended family for a sojourn in a rented villa. There she seeks to block out thoughts of her unhappy relationship back in England and finds herself spending less time with her settled-down peers than with their hedonistic children, particularly the teenage Oakley (Tom Hiddleston, in his feature debut). It’s the kind of sharp examination of upper-class London types we’ve come to expect from the acclaimed director, who provokes us with her refreshingly complex and flawed female characters. Hogg would go on to explore similar ideas in her following effort Archipelago, also starring Hiddlestone and featuring a rich family whose frictions are exposed while on holiday in rainier British climes.
10. The Way, Way Back (2013)
Our next destination takes us stateside, to Massachusetts, where we join introverted teen Duncan (Liam James) as he spends the season at a beach house with his mother (Toni Collette), her loathsome new boyfriend (Steve Carrell) and his spoilt daughter (Zoe Levin). While the adults continually drink, smoke weed and party, Duncan finds refuge at the local waterpark, picking up odd jobs and embracing the sense of community fostered there. This aquatic haven serves as an incubator for the adolescent protagonist, allowing him to discover who he is at his own pace in classic coming-of-age tradition; writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash manage to empathetically capture this atmosphere without veering too far into saccharine territory. A charming entry in the ‘life-changing summer’ canon, and a rare example in this article of a holiday that ends on a happier note than it started on!
11. Us (2019)
While most of the films mentioned here are examples of holidays gone somewhat wrong, Jordan Peele’s superb followup to 2017’s Get Out takes the concept to the next level. Not long after commencing their summer jaunt in a California lakehouse, the Wilsons find themselves confronted by unwelcome visitors. But this isn’t your usual home invasion; the strangers are all doppelgängers of the family, members of a hidden underclass called ‘the tethered’. Like the director’s previous film, it’s a refreshing remix of classic horror tropes, full of dark humour and cryptic social commentary, right down to that intriguingly ambiguous title. Featuring an excellent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o as protagonist Adelaide (and her tethered counterpart), this frightful skewering of American class relations will leave you double-checking the locks in your next Airbnb.
