15 Movies to Watch Alone at Night That Hit Harder in the Dark

Some films play differently at 1 a.m. The house is quiet, the phone is face down, and a cab driver who can’t sleep feels a lot closer than he did at a Saturday matinee.

These are the best movies to watch alone at night, and they’re some of the best movies to watch at night in any company. Almost all of them take place after dark, and most follow someone who is alone: a driver, a stringer, a lunar miner, a man on the phone for 85 minutes. They’re ranked on how hard they hit when you watch them by yourself, how they hold up and what critics and audiences made of them. Each entry has the budget, the box office, both Rotten Tomatoes scores and how the filmmakers shot the night.

The Best Movies to Watch Alone at Night at a Glance

#	Film	Year	Night on screen	Critics / audiences	Box office
15	Locke	2013	Nearly all	90% / 72%	$5.2M
14	Good Time	2017	Most	91% / 82%	$3.3M to $4.1M
13	Moon	2009	No Earth day	90% / 89%	$9.8M to $10.7M
12	After Hours	1985	Nearly all	90% / 87%	$10.7M (US)
11	Thief	1981	About half	80% / 81%	$11.5M (US)
10	Prisoners	2013	About half	82% / 87%	$113M to $122M
9	Eyes Wide Shut	1999	Most	77% / 74%	$104M to $162M
8	Her	2013	About half	95% / 82%	$48M
7	Collateral	2004	Nearly all	86% / 84%	$218M
6	Lost in Translation	2003	About half	95% / 85%	$117M
5	Mulholland Drive	2001	Some	83% / 87%	$20M
4	Blade Runner 2049	2017	About half	88% / 88%	$260M to $278M
3	Drive	2011	About half	93% / 79%	$81M
2	Nightcrawler	2014	Nearly all	95% / 86%	$50M
1	Taxi Driver	1976	Most	89% / 93%	$28.3M (US)

Rotten Tomatoes critic and audience scores as of October 2026. Box office is worldwide unless marked US. Where The Numbers and Box Office Mojo disagree, both figures are shown.

Four of these films happen almost entirely after dark: Locke, After Hours, Collateral and Nightcrawler. The night bands are our estimates from each film’s story and production notes. Two have hard numbers from the shoot. Locke was shot only at night, and 24 of Nightcrawler’s 26 shooting days were nights.

15) Locke (2013)

Tom Hardy drives from Birmingham to London at night, and the whole film happens on his phone.

Ivan Locke is a construction manager with the biggest concrete pour in Europe set for the morning. Instead, he gets in his car and drives the other way. Hardy is the only person on screen, and every other actor is a voice on the car phone.

Hardy played long stretches of the script in single takes, and the voice cast called in live each night. “Every night we put the cameras in different places,” Knight told We Got This Covered. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos lit the car with small LEDs running about 20 programmed “chase” patterns to mimic passing road light. Watch it alone and it’s like riding in the passenger seat.

14) Good Time (2017)

Robert Pattinson spends one long night in Queens trying to get his brother out of jail.

Connie Nikas robs a bank with his brother Nick, and only Nick gets caught. The rest of the film is Connie running through the night trying to raise bail, and every idea he has makes it worse. It played in competition at Cannes.

Sean Price Williams shot it on 2-perf 35mm, using Kodak 500T for the nights. “It sees so much in the dark,” he told Kodak. The street scenes couldn’t be lit, so the color comes from real signs, with LED panels adding purples, reds and greens. “Sometimes, I would just walk in and turn lights off,” Josh Safdie told No Film School, “just because it’s a nocturnal movie.”

13) Moon (2009)

Sam Rockwell has been alone on a lunar base for three years, and his contract is almost up.

Sam Bell mines helium-3 on the far side of the moon with only a robot named GERTY for company. Two weeks before he’s due home, he crashes a rover and wakes up to find someone else on the base. “The frustration and sense of isolation that Sam Bell, the main character, feels is definitely something I was channelling,” Jones told The Guardian.

It was shot in 33 days at Shepperton Studios. “We built the moon base as a full 360-degree set and we would seal the cast and crew in at the start of the day,” Jones said. The lunar exteriors are miniatures. Rockwell played against a tennis ball on a stand, or against a double seen from behind.

12) After Hours (1985)

A word processor goes to SoHo for a late-night date and can’t get home.

Paul Hackett meets a woman in a coffee shop, takes a cab downtown and loses his only $20 bill out the window. The night only gets worse from there. Toronto’s Catherine O’Hara plays the Mister Softee driver who joins the mob hunting him.

Scorsese usually managed about five setups a day. After Hours needed 16 to stay on budget, so cinematographer Michael Ballhaus used fast film stock and available light. “It was dinner for breakfast,” Dunne told the BFI. “It took a while to get my body back to non-vampiric living.” It’s the anxiety film on this list, so maybe don’t watch it right before bed.

11) Thief (1981)

James Caan is a safecracker who wants one last score and a normal life, in that order.

Frank has done 11 years in prison. He keeps the life he wants next in his wallet, as a collage cut from magazines. A Chicago crime boss offers him the job that could pay for it. Roger Ebert called Frank “a loner who desperately needs to belong to somebody.”

Retired safecracker John Santucci trained Caan and plays a crooked cop. Tangerine Dream wrote the score after Mann dropped the idea of Chicago blues. Mann later took crime after dark to Los Angeles in Heat and Collateral (#7). For more on the look, see our guide to film noir.

10) Prisoners (2013)

Hugh Jackman’s daughter goes missing on Thanksgiving, and he decides the police are too slow.

Two girls disappear from a quiet Pennsylvania street, and the only suspect is released for lack of evidence. Keller Dover takes him anyway. Detective Loki works the case by the book while Keller stops pretending there is one.

Roger Deakins shot it on the Alexa and lit the nights almost entirely with practical light. “I didn’t want to put any extraneous light on the scene by using overheads on towers or Condors,” he told American Cinematographer. Real candles are the main light in the candlelight vigil. Atlanta’s suburbs played Pennsylvania. It’s two and a half hours of dread, best watched with nobody else in the room.

9) Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Tom Cruise walks through one night in New York after his wife tells him something he can’t forget.

Dr. Bill Harford leaves home after midnight and ends up in a masked party at a mansion outside the city. Kubrick died in March 1999, six days after delivering his final cut. It opened at No. 1 that July.

Kubrick shot it in England, with New York streets built at Pinewood. A second unit filmed real New York plates for the walking shots. Cinematographer Larry Smith used Kodak’s 500-speed EXR 5298, and Deluxe pushed it two stops in processing. “We tried out a variety of different Christmas lights before I found the ones I wanted in a catalogue,” he told American Cinematographer. “They were very low-wattage, but had a really magical quality.”

8) Her (2013)

A lonely letter writer falls in love with his computer’s operating system.

Theodore Twombly writes other people’s love letters for a living and goes home to an empty apartment. Then he installs Samantha. Jonze said it’s about “how we try to connect and fail to connect.”

Hoyte van Hoytema shot his first digital feature here, and he chose the Alexa for the night scenes in Theodore’s apartment. Shanghai stood in for parts of Los Angeles. Toronto’s Owen Pallett shared the score’s Oscar nomination with Arcade Fire’s Will Butler. See where the rest was shot in our guide to where Her was filmed.

7) Collateral (2004)

A cab driver picks up a hitman for five stops across Los Angeles in one night.

Max has driven a cab for 12 years and keeps saying it’s temporary. Vincent gets in his back seat with a list of names. The story runs from dusk to dawn, and the cab scenes make up about a third of the film.

“I wanted to shoot the whole film at night, and right away I knew I’d never be able to get what I wanted by shooting 35mm,” Mann told Film & Video. About half the film ended up digital, and every night exterior was shot on HD. Each cab had about 30 electroluminescent panels so the light felt like it had no source. “We were like vampires, dreading the rising sun,” cinematographer Dion Beebe told American Cinematographer.

6) Lost in Translation (2003)

Two Americans who can’t sleep meet in a Tokyo hotel bar.

Bob Harris is in Tokyo to shoot a whisky ad. Charlotte is there with a husband who’s always working. Neither can sleep. “Jet lag makes you contemplate life in a different way,” Coppola told Filmmaker.

It was shot in 27 days on 35mm. The Park Hyatt Tokyo let them film in its public areas only after 1 or 2 a.m. “The hardest part … was running around shooting all night and then shooting day scenes in the morning,” Coppola told the Christian Science Monitor. It made about $29 for every dollar it cost, the best return on this list.

5) Mulholland Drive (2001)

A car crash on Mulholland Drive leaves a woman with no memory, and a new arrival in Hollywood decides to help her.

Betty arrives in Los Angeles to be an actress and finds Rita hiding in her aunt’s apartment. The second half rearranges everything you’ve just watched. A 2016 BBC Culture poll of 177 critics named it the best film of the 21st century.

“I had no frustrations with it until ABC saw the pilot and hated it and in a sense killed it,” Lynch told Salon. “Looking back, I see that they did me a huge favor.” He turned it into a feature after “I sat down one night, and these ideas came into me.” For more, see our guide to David Lynch movies.

4) Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

A replicant blade runner goes home every night to a hologram, and then finds a secret worth killing for.

K comes home to an apartment and a girlfriend, Joi, who is a hologram. A case about a buried box of bones turns his whole life into a question. “I wanted the world to be one of bleakness and gloom but to have sparks of beauty,” Villeneuve told TIME.

It was shot over 92 days in Hungary, about two-thirds of it on stages near Budapest. Deakins built the looks on set, not in post. “So, basically, everything was done (on set). It wasn’t created in post,” he told Filmmaker. The orange Las Vegas haze came from a filter pack and 250 space lights. It has a strong Canadian thread too: a Quebec director, a star from London, Ontario, and Oscar-winning effects work from Framestore’s Montreal studio. For more on its look, see our colour grading picks.

3) Drive (2011)

A stunt driver with no name drives getaway cars at night and falls for the woman down the hall.

Refn’s pitch to Gosling was the whole film in one sentence: “We’re gonna make a movie about a man who drives around in a car at night, listening to pop music.” Their first meeting went badly. Gosling drove Refn back to his hotel, REO Speedwagon came on the radio, and Refn turned it up and sang along.

Newton Thomas Sigel shot it on the Alexa, picked early for low light. “We had a tight budget and very little time,” he told American Cinematographer. At the Point Mugu beach scene, the amber sodium streetlamps are right there in the frame, and the gaffer added portable sodium lights to match. Los Angeles began swapping its sodium streetlights for LEDs in 2009, so Drive caught a look that’s almost gone.

2) Nightcrawler (2014)

Jake Gyllenhaal buys a camcorder and a police scanner, and finds out the late news pays for blood.

Lou Bloom is a thief with no job and a lot of self-help phrases. He starts filming car wrecks and crime scenes and selling the footage to a struggling station. Gyllenhaal built Lou around a coyote: “At night these animals come down into the city and scavenge,” he told LAist.

Robert Elswit shot the nights on the Alexa and the days on 35mm film, so the days “look a little different.” Twenty-four of the 26 shooting days were nights. There was no money for big rigs, so he picked locations where the city’s own light did the work. “In his desperate loneliness and probably raging insanity, the precepts of capitalism became a religion to him,” Gilroy told The Playlist. Want more movies like Nightcrawler? Start with Taxi Driver, Drive and Collateral on this list.

1) Taxi Driver (1976)

A Vietnam veteran who can’t sleep drives a cab through New York at night and decides he has to do something.

Travis Bickle takes the night shift because he can’t sleep anyway. “I wrote that script in 10 days and two drafts,” Schrader told Fresh Air. “I was living in my car and just sort of driving around and having a lot of trouble sleeping.” He later told Sight and Sound the cab was “a metal coffin on wheels, the absolute symbol of urban isolation.”

Michael Chapman shot the cab scenes with no permits and no camera car, the camera strapped to the hood and a battery pack in the trunk. “We had to take our level of light down to let New York light itself,” he said. De Niro improvised “You talkin’ to me?” Schrader later said, “To me, it’s the best thing in the movie. And I didn’t write it.” Bernard Herrmann finished recording the score and died hours later, on Christmas Eve 1975. It’s the best movie to watch alone at night because it’s about exactly that.

How Filmmakers Shoot the Night

Shooting at night is hard and expensive, and these films found different ways around it. They show how much of a night look comes from choices you can make on any budget.

• Let the city light it. Taxi Driver and Nightcrawler both kept lighting small and let streetlights and storefronts do the work. Prisoners lit its vigil with real candles. If you’re starting out, our guides to low-key lighting and lighting in film cover the basics.
• Push the film. Eyes Wide Shut pushed its stock two stops for the glow and grain under Christmas lights. Good Time used Kodak 500T because it “sees so much in the dark.”
• Go digital for the dark. Collateral used HD for every night exterior because film couldn’t see the Los Angeles night the way Mann wanted. Drive, Nightcrawler, Prisoners and Her all used the Alexa for their nights.
• Build the light into the set. Locke ran LED chase patterns inside the car. Moon built its lighting into the base. Blade Runner 2049 hung 250 space lights over one stage.
• Shoot when you can. Lost in Translation could only shoot the Park Hyatt’s public areas in the middle of the night. After Hours ran 16 setups a day to stay on budget.

Lost in Translation is too big for the chart. It turned $4 million into $117 million, about $29 for every dollar. Taxi Driver made about $15 per dollar in the US alone. Good Time and Thief aren’t on the chart because no reliable budget has been published for them.

Critics vs Audiences

Audiences liked Taxi Driver, Prisoners and Mulholland Drive more than critics did. Critics liked Locke, Drive and Her a lot more than audiences did. Locke shows the biggest split, at 90% from critics and 72% from audiences.

More Movies to Watch Alone at Night

Film	Year	Director	Why watch it
Fight Club	1999	David Fincher	An insomniac office worker and a man named Tyler. It’s #4 on our best 90s thriller movies
Se7en	1995	David Fincher	Two detectives, seven sins, rain that never stops. It’s #2 on the same list
Night on Earth	1991	Jim Jarmusch	Five cab rides on the same night in five cities
Blade Runner	1982	Ridley Scott	The original rain-soaked Los Angeles, before 2049
Insomnia	2002	Christopher Nolan	Al Pacino can’t sleep under the Alaska midnight sun
The Machinist	2004	Brad Anderson	Christian Bale as a factory worker who hasn’t slept in a year

FAQs About Movies to Watch Alone at Night

The Final Cut on Movies to Watch Alone at Night

The best movies to watch at night aren’t always the scariest. They’re the ones about people who can’t sleep, can’t go home or can’t find anyone to talk to. Taxi Driver tops the list because it’s the purest version of that, a lonely man in a cab at night, made for $1.9 million. Nightcrawler and Drive are right behind it.

Turn off the lights, put the phone away and pick one you haven’t seen. Which film do you save for when you’re the only one up?