The summer of cinema is urging us to break the spell of our screens
Many of the biggest on-screen hits holding our dazed attention this summer seem to have a shared message. Somewhat ironically, it’s to shed our technological chains and get into the great outdoors.
Cinema has always sold the fantasy of the transformative summer spent outdoors. It’s the kind found in The Sandlot’s sunburnt baseball summer; Wes Anderson’s runaway-lovers in Moonrise Kingdom and Luca Guadagnino’s Italian peach-orchard romance Call Me by Your Name. Children and adults alike doing away with the supervision and trappings of modern life to acquire grass stains on their clothing thanks to whimsical and/or sexy antics. This used to be a gentle suggestion to break free, but lately, the message has lost its subtlety.
The recently released Toy Story 5 mourns childhoods lost to the eerie hum of a handheld tablet. The bold and brilliant series Silo is a prestige sci-fi epic about the horror of not being allowed outside. With season three, viewers get to see just how we, in the imminent near future, ended up underground dreaming of fresh air. Indie horror hit Backrooms’ monster lives in an infinite windowless hallway that is, functionally, doomscrolling with teeth.
Meanwhile, the film The Last House, starring Wagner Moura and Greta Lee, traps a family indoors for years as they stare longingly at the outside that once was. Even the cosier titles are in on it: the Little House on the Prairie reboot pines for a life with no screens, and the series Every Year After finds two people falling in love on the strength of one unplugged week a year at a lake with no texts in between, and somehow none needed.
Whether they are told on TV or on the big screen, and whether they concern monsters or lovers, these stories share one message: Go outside.
Out in the real world, a spell of heatwaves has settled like a haze over Europe and many other places besides. It’s the kind of languid heat that makes running into the sea both spiritual guidance and a public safety announcement. Meanwhile, the UK has just announced a ban on social media for under-16s, hoping to usher an entire generation into the great outdoors.
At a time when many of us are worried about the prospect of soon living in a hauntingly grim tech dystopia, we must admit that our machines are giving us fair warning about the dangers of losing ourselves to screens. This summer we just have to look up from them and act on it.
Leila Latif is a film critic and broadcaster based in London.
