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20. Frozen (2013)
Pathetic fallacy is the literary device in which the environment reflects a character’s mood. It is central to Disney’s animated classic, which is about a woman who gets so annoyed that she literally turns her surroundings into a perpetual winter. As such, she is responsible for untold miseries, not least the fact that her stroppiness directly caused the invention of Josh Gad’s annoying snowman.
19. The Shining (1980)
Perhaps the defining movie on seasonal affective disorder. In The Shining, Jack Nicholson’s family suffer as he succumbs to the madness of snowbound isolation. Although the interior scenes are what really give the film its terrifying reputation, it’s worth remembering that none of the events would occur if the Overlook Hotel was easy to escape. Also a timely reminder that snow really takes the fun out of mazes.
18. Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott’s classic is a masterpiece of design, with its rain-drenched futuristic cityscapes playing as much of a role as any of the actual characters. Does the constant rain affect the plot? No, not really, although you’d have to imagine that everyone would be a lot less grimly miserable if the sun came out now and again.
17. Force Majeure (2014)
Remade in 2020 as Downhill, Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is more about how people react to perceived weather than the weather itself. It follows the repercussions for a man who, upon believing that an avalanche is about to hit, abandons his family and runs away. Everything is immediately undone, and what follows is excruciatingly hard to watch.
16. The Thing (1982)
Ultimately weather isn’t the first thing you think about when you think about The Thing, because that would be the thing itself in all its nightmarishly grotesque glory. However, try to imagine the film in a lovely springtime meadow and it instantly loses all its power. Its Antarctic setting means that all the characters are isolated and visibility is constantly low. This is what makes the film such a claustrophobic classic.
15. Hard Rain (1998)
A notorious flop upon release, Hard Rain is a film where a criminal gang attempts to conduct a heist, only to be outdone by – you guessed it – some pretty hard rain. The film tries so hard to be serious that it eventually becomes enjoyably silly, although Morgan Freeman is miscast as a baddie and Minnie Driver complained that she wasn’t allowed to wear a wetsuit because the producers wanted her nipples to be visible.
14. Everest (2015)
Although it has now essentially become a theme park for the rich and reckless, it’s important to remember that multiple people die on Mount Everest every year. Everest – an all-star Poseidon Adventure-style ensemble piece – tells the story of a real life disaster that befell climbers in 1996, when eight were caught in a blizzard and died during their descent. The film does a good job of showing how unsurvivable conditions are there. Indeed, just five months before the film was released, 22 people were killed when the mountain was struck by an avalanche.
13. Take Shelter (2011)
Few partnerships in film are as satisfying as the one between Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon. Take Shelter is a perfect example. Shannon plays a man plagued with visions of terrible storms. Are they premonitions or is he mentally ill? It’s a premise that allows both parties to work to their strengths; Shannon is tortured and haunting, and the amount of psychological tension that the writer-director Nichols can wring from the story is astonishing.
12. Into the Wild (2007)
Sean Penn’s retelling of the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who ventured unprepared into Alaska, has long inspired a small army of copyists, many of whom end up having to be rescued. Which makes you wonder what film they were watching, since Into the Wild is a tale of a man showing up unprepared for all manner of storms, floods and ice. It’s beautifully done, but probably better to just stay at home.
11. The Impossible (2012)
Those who remember the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami will long be haunted by the news footage of its aftermath, with bodies piled up outside hospitals. The Impossible is a dramatisation of that event. And while not universally well received upon release – it was just eight years after the disaster, and since its stars were Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, some accused it of whitewashing what really happened – it remains a profoundly upsetting watch.
10. The Revenant (2015)
Back in 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio was so desperate for an Oscar that he ended up subjecting himself to The Revenant, a film where an endless litany of awful things happen to his character. And while it does get a bit slapstick at times – occasionally veering into Mr Bean cosplay territory – he does end up being relentlessly clobbered by the weather. There are storms. There is rain. It gets so cold that his beard freezes. It is all tremendously unpleasant but it did the job, proving that nothing gets you an Oscar faster than a bit of inclement weather.
9. Twister (1996)
Twister – and to a lesser extent its recent sequel Twisters – speaks to a deeply American fascination with storms. Where other films paint tornadoes as things to hide from at all costs, Twister turns them into a spectacle. All the characters here are determined to chase them no matter what, whooping and hollering as they go. It respects the severity of storms, which demolish houses and vehicles, but is such a mid-90s blockbuster that only bad guys and side characters die. It is a good tornado movie, but is it the best tornado movie? No, and that’s thanks to …
8. Sharknado (2013)
Because, while Twister is fun, it has to lose points for the tornadoes not being stuffed to the gills with legions of murderous sharks. This is not an accusation you can level at Sharknado, which is explicitly a film about a tornado stuffed with murderous sharks. Made on the cheap, in order to maximise on the ridiculous trend for knock-off creature features that began with Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Sharknado is deliberately extremely preposterous from start to finish. While it deserves to be watched, the same probably cannot be said about all its sequels, especially the one starring Jedward.
7. Magnolia (1999)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is the director’s attempt to process his father’s death, but it is so ambitious and sprawling that it essentially ends up being about everything. This includes freak weather events. The film’s emotional climax comes in the form of millions of frogs falling from the sky. At first it is absurd. Then, as the frogs hammer down, breaking windows and causing car crashes, it becomes terrifying, then upsetting, then awe-inspiring. It is also much more of a logistical nightmare than many of the films in this list, since it is much harder to mop up a citywide ankle-deep deluge of frogs than it is some snow.
6. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
It would be astonishingly easy to fill this entire list with films made by Roland Emmerich, a man who has dedicated his entire career to making films where loads of people get punished by incredibly crap weather. However, The Day After Tomorrow is perhaps the best microcosm of his oeuvre. There’s a hailstorm. There’s a hurricane. There’s wind and rain. There’s the sudden appearance of a new ice age. There’s a pack of loose wolves, which isn’t traditionally meteorological but deserves mention. It is Emmerich’s climate crisis movie; a grand warning that, unless we change our ways, we’re going to either freeze to death or get eaten by wolves.
5. The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Fair warning: from this point onwards, the list starts to skew heavily towards people having a rubbish time on a boat. And with this in mind, it would be wrong to ignore the ur-text of people having a rubbish time on a boat. A film about a luxury cruise liner being undone by a tsunami, it features a murderer’s row of performers, including Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley and Roddy McDowall. The disaster movie that other disaster movies aspire to be, it was the highest-grossing movie of 1973 and won two Oscars. Bit weird to describe a film about mass death as an adventure, though.
4. Noah (2014)
Darren Aronofsky has made a career of depicting terrible things happening to people, so it stands to reason that he would eventually make a film about an incredibly terrible thing that happened to everyone at once. Noah, his retelling of the story of Noah’s Ark, is his highest-grossing film to date, but also possibly his least well remembered. Did you know Ray Winstone is in it? Did you know Emma Watson is in it? Did you know that several countries banned it on religious grounds? Either way, you have to agree that it is a film about some absolutely dreadful weather.
3. The Mist (2007)
This will be contentious because, when it comes to films about droplets of water that are suspended in air, some people get absolutely furious. In one corner there are fans of John Carpenter’s The Fog (about some spooky things hiding in some fog), and in the other are fans of Frank Darabont’s The Mist (about some spooky things hiding in some mist). There is only room for one of these on this list and, for me, The Mist just about edges it. This is partly because it’s based on a Stephen King novel, and partly because it has one of the most hilariously overwrought endings of any film in history. I welcome your emails.
2. The Perfect Storm (2000)
You know a film has hit a nerve when it becomes part of the lexicon. We live in an age where almost everything is described as a perfect storm, and it’s all because of this film: a story of some fishermen off the Massachusetts coast who found themselves tragically caught up in a nightmarish combination of high pressure, a cold front and a hurricane. It’s a good film, with strong performances by George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, but the knowledge that this really happened (in 1991) makes it all the more heartbreaking.
1. All Is Lost (2013)
What a thing of beauty this is. The only actor in All Is Lost is Robert Redford, and only 51 words are spoken aloud in the entire film. All Is Lost is the story of a sailor who realises that there is a hole in his boat, with a storm approaching. The boat flips. He’s thrown overboard. He gets in a raft. There’s another storm. Things do not altogether go great. It might just be Redford’s best film, his face gradually transforming into a gritty monument of stoicism as he quietly accepts his fate. It might not be a perfect storm, but it’s a perfect film.
