As The Doyenne of Death and expert on Mortality Movies, I’m often asked if I spend all my time thinking about death.
My answer? Of course not.
I also think about films and TV shows, snacks, and how avoiding conversations about mortality tends to make people more anxious, not less.
Which brings me to 2025: a year that quietly delivered some of the most thoughtful, emotionally resonant films about mortality we’ve seen in a long time. These weren’t doom-and-gloom movies. They were life movies, ones that understand something essential:
Talking about death doesn’t shorten life.
It deepens it.
Here are my top three Mortality Movies of 2025. These are films that don’t just depict death, but explore what it means to be alive because we die.
1. The Life of Chuck
Your life matters more than you think
If you’ve ever wondered whether your life is “big enough” to matter, The Life of Chuck has news for you: It already does.
Told in reverse, this film walks us backward through the life of an ordinary man, starting with the end of the world (no pressure) and moving steadily toward childhood. Along the way, we’re reminded that a life isn’t defined by its résumé highlights, but by its relationships, moments of connection, and quiet joys.
This isn’t a movie about how someone dies. It’s about how someone exists. This movie doesn’t shout its message. It whispers it, and trusts you to lean in.
The film suggests that each of us contains multitudes — relationships, memories, love, regret — and when a person dies, an entire cosmos disappears with them. Not in a flashy sci-fi way, but in the deeply human sense that no one else ever lives your version of reality.
As someone who spends a lot of time helping people reflect on their lives near the end, I found this film deeply affirming. We don’t need grand achievements to leave an impact. Our presence alone changes the universe we inhabit.
Doyenne takeaway:
Your life doesn’t have to be spectacular to be significant.
Being here, loving, noticing, caring, is enough.
2. Hamnet
Grief is love with nowhere to go
Let me say this upfront: Hamnet is not an easy watch, and that’s exactly why it’s so important.
This beautifully restrained film explores the death of Shakespeare’s young son and the grief that follows, particularly for his wife, Agnes. It doesn’t rush mourning or wrap it up neatly. Instead, it honors grief as something that unfolds in its own time, in its own body, in its own way.
Jessie Buckley’s performance is devastating in its restraint, while Paul Mescal portrays a man struggling to process loss through distance, language, and eventually art. If you know the play Hamlet, you’ll recognize how personal tragedy becomes creative alchemy — but you don’t need literary knowledge to feel the emotional truth here.
I often tell people: grief isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s a process to be witnessed. Hamnet understands this deeply.
There are long silences. There are heart-wrenching screams. There are moments where nothing “happens.” And yet everything is happening.
Doyenne takeaway:
Grief doesn’t mean something went wrong.
It means love was real.
3. Sinners
Immortality is overrated
Now for something completely different — because mortality doesn’t always arrive quietly with candlelight and tears.
Sinners uses vampire mythology to ask a question humans have been wrestling with forever: What would you give up to live forever? Set in the Jim Crow South, the film layers social commentary, horror, and music into a story about desire, power, and the cost of escaping death.
Here’s the thing I loved most about this movie: it doesn’t romanticize immortality. Instead, it shows how endless life can drain meaning from moments. When nothing ends, nothing matters quite as much.
Instead, it exposes the lie at its core. Eternal life, the film suggests, often means eternal hunger — and disconnection from what makes us human. Music, intimacy, community, risk. Mortality is not the flaw in life. It’s the engine.
Stylish, unsettling, and emotionally charged, Sinners reminds us that fearing death can sometimes cost us our lives.
As someone who spends a lot of time reminding people that death gives life its urgency, this film felt like a stylish cinematic amen.
Doyenne takeaway:
Mortality isn’t life’s flaw.
It’s life’s fuel.
Why These Mortality Movies Matter (Especially Now)
What connects these three films isn’t death itself. It’s attention.
The Life of Chuck asks us to notice the significance of ordinary lives
Hamnet invites us to honor grief instead of rushing past it
Sinners reminds us that limits are what make life precious
Together, they offer a gentle but firm reminder: avoiding conversations about death doesn’t protect us. It just keeps us from fully engaging with life.
And if movies can help us practice these conversations — in the dark, with popcorn, among strangers — all the better.
Let’s Talk
Which movies this year made you think about mortality, meaning, or what really matters?
Tell me in the comments. Because death is universal, and talking about it doesn’t have to be scary. Sometimes, it’s even illuminating.
Until next time,
The Doyenne of Death 💀✨