When Loss Feels Like a Dream: 18 Surreal Films That Explore Grief

Grief is rarely linear. It distorts time, erodes identity, and clouds our sense of reality. In cinema, some of the most powerful explorations of mourning have emerged not through realism, but through surrealism. These films use dream logic, uncanny images, and fractured timelines to express what grief actually feels like: confusing, isolating, and often beyond words.

Below is a list of 18 surreal films that explore grief and approach loss in unconventional, imaginative ways, where the surreal becomes a language for the unspeakable.

Sinners (2025) Directed by Ryan Coogler

Set in the Jim Crow South, “Sinners” follows a gifted musician named Sammie as he struggles with his love for the blues and the church, while navigating a surreal, racially charged reality that blends spiritualism, folklore, and musical expression.

In one standout scene, Sammie improvises a powerful jam session that fuses every major genre of Black music into a transcendent moment of collective grief and ancestral connection. The film explores how grief becomes personal and cultural, something passed through rhythm, storytelling, and sound. It’s a haunting, genre-defying experience that reclaims trauma through music.

Titane (2021) Directed by Julia Ducournau

After committing a violent crime, a woman disguises herself as a grieving man’s long-lost son.

Body horror and gender identity collide with grief and unconditional acceptance. The surrealism is extreme, car sex, identity swaps, unexplained pregnancies, but it highlights the emotional depth of a man who mourns and chooses connection over truth.

Personal Shopper (2016) Directed by Olivier Assayas

Maureen, a personal shopper for a celebrity in Paris, waits for a sign from her recently deceased twin brother.

A quiet, slow-burning ghost story, the film explores spiritual grief and the silence left behind after someone dies. Its minimalist aesthetic heightens the ambiguity between the real and the supernatural, suggesting that grief is, in itself, a kind of haunting.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) Directed by Oz Perkins

Two girls are left alone at their boarding school over winter break. Elsewhere, a mysterious woman is making her way toward them.

The film slowly reveals itself as a meditation on isolation, possession, and grief. Its final moments recontextualize the story as one of unbearable emotional loss. The possession is demonic, but it’s also a desperate refusal to be alone.

Hereditary (2018) Directed by Ari Aster

After the death of her mother, Annie and her family experience a series of increasingly disturbing events.

Grief becomes ritualistic and generational, with trauma passed down like an inheritance. The house itself, styled like a dollhouse, reinforces the theme of control slipping away. The surreal horror crescendos into something mythic, where family history becomes fate, and loss becomes possession.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

A surgeon befriends a teenage boy who later demands a horrific moral sacrifice.

Inspired by Greek tragedy, the film deals with anticipatory grief: the terror of knowing a loss is coming and being helpless to stop it. Its clinical tone, stiff performances, and surreal dialogue enhance the feeling of emotional paralysis and inevitability.

Nope (2022) Directed by Jordan Peele

After the mysterious death of their father, two siblings try to capture footage of a UFO on their ranch.

Beneath the alien thriller is a layered story of familial grief, generational trauma, and the way tragedy is turned into spectacle. Peele uses genre to mask deeper emotional themes, exploring how people perform survival while coping with unresolved loss.

The Lovely Bones (2009) Directed by Peter Jackson

After being murdered, 14-year-old Susie Salmon watches from the afterlife as her family struggles to move forward.

Her limbo is a vibrant, surreal landscape that reflects her emotional state, beautiful but unsettling, peaceful yet incomplete. The contrast between this fantastical realm and the real world captures the dissonance between the dead and the living, and the pain of being unable to help the ones you love heal.

The Whale (2022) Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Charlie, a reclusive English teacher suffering from severe obesity, tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter before it’s too late.

The film’s stage-like presentation and hyper-focused setting create a claustrophobic atmosphere. His grief over lost relationships and personal failure manifests physically, spiritually, and psychologically. It’s a story about shame, forgiveness, and the unbearable weight of unresolved sorrow.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Directed by Michel Gondry

After a painful breakup, Joel discovers his ex-girlfriend has undergone a procedure to erase all memories of him. Heartbroken, he decides to do the same.

As his memories disappear one by one, Joel fights to hold on to what they meant. The film’s surreal visuals, melting faces, collapsing rooms, and disappearing streets, mirror the emotional confusion and desperation of heartbreak. Grief becomes a maze of memories we aren't ready to let go of.

The Boy and the Heron (2023) Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Mahito, a boy grieving the death of his mother, enters a magical world through a crumbling tower.

The film blends reality and fantasy to explore grief, war, and healing. The multiverse-like structure mirrors the fragmented way we revisit the past and imagine different outcomes after loss. It is both epic and intimate, as only Miyazaki can deliver.

A Ghost Story (2017) Directed by David Lowery

After dying in a car accident, a man returns to his home as a ghost, clad in a plain white sheet, and silently observes the life he left behind.

The film moves slowly through time, as the ghost watches his partner grieve, strangers take over the home, and centuries pass. With almost no dialogue, it becomes a meditation on impermanence, memory, and the loneliness of loss. The ghost doesn’t haunt out of vengeance, but out of longing, a desire to still belong.

The Babadook (2014) Directed by Jennifer Kent

Amelia, a grieving widow, struggles to raise her troubled son while coping with the traumatic loss of her husband.

Grief takes monstrous form in the Babadook, a sinister creature from a mysterious pop-up book. The horror becomes a metaphor for unprocessed trauma and the more she tries to suppress it, the more powerful it becomes. The film asks: what if grief doesn’t want to be exorcised, but acknowledged?

Birdman (2014) Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

A washed-up actor attempts to reclaim his career and repair his relationship with his daughter by mounting a Broadway play.

Shot to appear as one continuous take, the film blends reality and hallucination. Grief over faded fame and personal failures pushes the protagonist to the edge of sanity. The fantastical elements become a metaphor for internal disintegration.

Donnie Darko (2001) Directed by Richard Kelly

A troubled teenager begins seeing visions of a man in a rabbit suit who tells him the world will end.

The film blurs reality and hallucination to explore themes of death, guilt, and fate. Donnie’s journey becomes a metaphysical response to survivor's guilt and the unknowable weight of existence. Time travel becomes a coping mechanism for the chaos he can’t control.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) Directed by Charlie Kaufman

A woman visits her boyfriend's childhood home, but nothing is as it seems. Time loops, conversations repeat, and identities shift.

Beneath its psychological complexity is a portrait of an aging man grieving the life he never lived. The surreal structure, with its impossible shifts in time, character, and reality, mirrors a mind unraveling under the weight of regret, repression, and lost potential. It’s a story about mourning not just people, but possibilities.

Aftersun (2022) Directed by Charlotte Wells

A woman remembers a childhood vacation with her father, piecing together camcorder footage and fragmented memories.

What begins as a nostalgic coming-of-age story slowly reveals itself to be an elegy for a lost parent. The emotional gaps, nonlinear editing, and final dance sequence evoke the surreal haze of memory, where moments are both precious and impossible to fully grasp. The film lingers in the ache of what we didn’t see, and what we can never know.

Beau Is Afraid (2023) Directed by Ari Aster

Beau embarks on an increasingly surreal journey to visit his mother, facing nightmarish obstacles at every turn.

Aster blends absurdist horror with tragic surrealism. Underneath the chaos and grotesque imagery is deep maternal grief, abandonment trauma, and the fear of never being good enough. The film’s distorted logic is the logic of anxiety and loss.

These films remind us that grief isn’t always something that can be logically explained or neatly resolved. Instead, through surrealism, cinema allows us to feel the confusion, horror, beauty, and mystery of loss in all its strange and devastating forms. These stories sit at the edge of reality—where memory blurs, time collapses, and healing takes on unexpected shapes.