The Winter GuestMovies like The Winter Guest
- Key Features:
- Grief, Family drama, Intergenerational relationships, Small town, Coming-of-age, Loss, Reconnection, Friendship, Mortality, Irish setting, Rural setting, Slice of life
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Drama enthusiasts, Introspective viewers, Character-driven stories, Art house cinema
- Emotional Arc:
- Loss → Reflection
The Winter Guest

It's winter in a small Scottish village near the sea, and multiple lives intersect in a day. Frances has just lost her husband to an early death, so her mother, Elspeth, travels to Frances' house to reconnect with her daughter and grandson, Alex. Meanwhile, old women Chloe and Lily go to a funeral, youngsters Sam and Tom cut class, and Alex gets a crush on tomboy Nita.
The Winter Guest
When Holly’s dark secret is accidentally uncovered by her new emotionally unstable neighbor Tom, they are pulled into a violent confrontation with her father, who will do anything to keep the secret hidden.

A soldier introduces himself to the Peterson family, claiming to be a friend of their son who died in action. After the young man is welcomed into their home, a series of accidental deaths seem to be connected to his presence.

A relaxing Christmas vacation turns into a terrifying fight for survival as the children begin to turn on their parents.

A drama focused on the friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a man who is traumatized after a fatal car accident.

When a father is forced to abruptly depart for work, he leaves his children, Aidan and Mia, at their holiday home in the care of his new girlfriend, Grace. Isolated and alone, a blizzard traps them inside the lodge as terrifying events summon specters from Grace's dark past.

The Doctor has retired to 1892 London. Despite the protests of his allies, he is determined to keep out of mankind's affairs. However, a governess named Clara has stumbled upon a plot which only the Doctor can unravel, involving the death of her predecessor in ice and the sinister Dr. Simeon, who controls monsters made of sentient snow. And there is another mystery afoot: Clara is the spitting image of Oswin Oswald, whom the Doctor saw die in the Dalek asylum...

In a bleak Inverness midwinter, Luisaidh is careening off the rails after the suicide of her best friend. She medicates her misery with joyless sex, chips and a belief in the power of positive drinking. Surrounded by bittersweet memories, she struggles to find someone to talk to or some reason to make life worthwhile at the most stressful time of the year.

David loves his wife, Gillian. Unfortunately, she died two years ago. David deals with his grief by continuing his romance with Gillian during walks with her "ghost" on the beach at night. While David lives in the past, other family problems crop up in the present in the real world....

It's an unforgettable Christmas for the townsfolk of Wellington-on-Sea when the worst snowstorm in history alters everyone's plans — including Santa's.

Biographer Margaret Lea travels to the isolated rural mansion of the famous writer Vida Winter, who asks her to write her biography. Although initially she is reluctant, as Vida is known for constantly distorting the facts of her life, Margaret soon becomes fascinated with the story of a dark childhood, a disturbing tale that leads her to finally confront the traumas of her own past.

Two separate stories mesh - in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.

Two women, one American and one British, swap homes at Christmastime following bad breakups. Each woman finds romance with a local man but realizes that the imminent return home may end the relationship.

A doctor takes in a mysterious man who washes ashore at her remote cottage with a gunshot wound. Quickly they both learn the killer has arrived to finish the job, while a storm has cut them off from the mainland.

The parents of a girl who was killed by a savage dog are granted the opportunity to spend three days with their deceased daughter.

A brother and sister are sent to their grandparents' remote Pennsylvania farm for a week, where they discover that the elderly couple is involved in something deeply disturbing.

A woman must fly back to her hometown when her Alzheimer's-stricken mother wanders into a blizzard. The return home forces her to confront her past.

Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose pink scarf is found wrapped around an ominous looking snowman.

When Jenny attends her sister’s winter wedding at an ice hotel, her heart melts over the best man, the problem is he unexpectedly brings a “plus one,” seemingly dashing her hopes for a wintery romance.

A young boy whose grieving family has forgotten about Christmas forms an unexpected, healing bond with a bubbly girl full of holiday spirit.

Widower Tom, on the recent passing of his wife Mary, uses his free bus pass to travel the length of Britain from John O'Groats in Caithness to Land's End in Cornwall, their shared birthplace, using only local buses. It's an incident-fuelled nostalgia trip and his encounters with local people make him a media phenomenon. Tom is totally unaware and to his surprise on arrival at Land’s End he’s greeted as a celebrity.

Young blonde translator Rebecca lives with her boyfriend ski instructor Marco in a mountain villa owned by her friend, nurse Laura. Rene, local cinema projectionist, steals Marco's car and gets into a car crash with local Theo, whose daughter, after being in coma for a time, dies. Rene suffers from partial short term memory loss and starts a relationship with Laura. Meanwhile Marco is looking for the man who stole his car and Theo - for the man who killed his daughter...

On Christmas Eve, an innocent couple become hosts to a malicious entity. Throughout the night they terrorise a family of five in unimaginably violent and disturbing ways.

In December 2004, close-knit family Maria, Henry and their three sons begin their winter vacation in Thailand. But the day after Christmas, the idyllic holiday turns into an incomprehensible nightmare when a terrifying roar rises from the depths of the sea, followed by a wall of black water that devours everything in its path. Though Maria and her family face their darkest hour, unexpected displays of kindness and courage ameliorate their terror.

After being dumped at the altar on her wedding day, Maggie Conway moves to the island town of Friday Harbor in Washington State, where she meets Mark Nagle, the local coffee shop owner.

Sophie Bennett begins a new holiday tradition of spending every holiday at the Evergreen Inn and Ski Lodge, which she inherited from her parents. Evergreen Inn is a special place filled with people who cannot make it home for the holidays or who have had such wonderful experiences that it has become their home-away-from-holiday-home. This Christmas, Sophie will meet an unforgettable family, and her own life will be forever changed.

Nell, Simon, and their boy Art are ready to welcome friends and family for what promises to be a perfect Christmas gathering. Perfect except for one thing: everyone is going to die.

Actress Reese Holden has been offered a small fortune by a book editor if she can secure for publication the love letters that her father, a reclusive novelist, wrote to her mother, who has since passed away. Returning to Michigan, Reese finds that an ex-grad student and a would-be musician have moved in with her father, who cares more about his new friends than he does about his own health and well-being.

Dumped by his girlfriend and finding himself stranded on different couches at friends’ places, Guido tries to transform his drift into an opportunity for a new beginning.

After being brutally murdered, 14-year-old Susie Salmon watches from heaven over her grief-stricken family -- and her killer. As she observes their daily lives, she must balance her thirst for revenge with her desire for her family to heal.

Oona, a recent graduate in anthropology, has returned to her dead mother’s seaside cottage in southern England to prepare it for sale. Her arrival disturbs Mani, a wary vagrant who has been squatting on the property.

A successful writer of children's books, Stephen Lewis is confronted with the unthinkable—he loses his only child, four-year-old Kate, in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realises his daughter is gone. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife on diverging paths as both struggle with an all-consuming grief.

Doug and Abi and their three children travel to the Scottish Highlands for Doug's father Gordie's birthday party. It's soon clear that when it comes to keeping a secret under wraps from the rest of the family, their children are their biggest liability...

Itinerant traveler Cassie Grant comes out of a car accident in Glastonbury, England, with partial memory loss. The deeply regretful driver allows her to convalesce at a large rural home, where she becomes friends with the woman's stepson, Michael. As Cassie delves into Michael's research about an old, newly discovered area church, it triggers some strange premonitions and offers gradual clues about her deeper links to this British community.

Eight very different couples deal with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.

A widowed fisherwoman, travelling alone through snowbound northern Minnesota, interrupts the kidnapping of a teenage girl. Hours from the nearest town and with no phone service, she realizes that she is the young girl's only hope.

Frances Austen, a young, wealthy spinster, invites a mute teenager into her apartment after finding him freezing in the park next to where she lives. Despite her best efforts, their lack of communication only increases her sense of loneliness, as her possessiveness spirals into frightening new realms.

A father, who can't keep his promises, dies in a car accident. One year later, he returns as a snowman, who has the final chance to put things right with his son before he is gone forever.

Harold Fry is an unremarkable man who has made mistakes with all the important things: being a husband, a father and a friend. And now, well into his 60s, he is content to fade quietly into the background of life. Until, one day – Harold learns his old friend Queenie is dying. Harold leaves home, walking to his post office to send her a letter. And out of the blue, Harold decides to keep walking, all the way to her hospice, 450 miles away.

A couple attempts to unravel a sinister plot within the English countryside estate of a dying man who has gathered an eclectic and notable group of house guests.

Felicie and Charles have a whirlwind holiday romance. Due to a mix-up on addresses they lose contact, and five years later at Christmas-time Felicie is living with her mother in a cold Paris with a daughter as a reminder of that long-ago summer. For male companionship she oscillates between hairdresser Maxence and the intellectual Loic, but seems unable to commit to either as the memory of Charles and what might have been hangs over everything.

Rose and her daughter Sofia travel to the Spanish seaside town of Almería to consult with the shamanic Dr. Gomez, a physician who could possibly hold the cure to Rose’s mystery illness, which has left her bound to a wheelchair. But in the sultry atmosphere of this sun-bleached town Sofia, who has been trapped by her mother’s illness all her life, finally starts to shed her inhibitions, enticed by the persuasive charms of enigmatic traveller Ingrid.

After inheriting a farm at Christmas time, a widowed father makes a bumpy adjustment to village life — while his kids hatch a plan to stay there forever.

A policeman suspects that several bizarre deaths in the same family were murders and that the killer is a mysterious woman who just moved to the village.

About three generations of a family grappling with a life-changing experience during one day of a vacation in the historic town of Sintra, Portugal.

Raimunda, a working-class woman living in Madrid, is dealing with the aftermath of a fire that killed her parents in her native village in La Mancha. Raimunda's life is further complicated when her deceased mother, Irene, returns as a ghost to resolve unfinished family business, including a murder and other buried truths.

A pastor preoccupied with writing the perfect sermon fails to realize that his wife is having an affair and his children are up to no good.

Leah, 10, has terrible nightmares. Her mother seems distant somehow, lost in her thoughts. A small, nightly visitor brings Leah comfort, but soon Leah will realize that her little visitor offers knowledge that might be very, very dangerous.

Kate is a young woman who has a habit of making bad decisions, and her last date with disaster occurs after she accepts work as Santa's elf for a department store. However, after she meets Tom there, her life takes a new turn.

A supernatural love story that centers on two parents whose life together falls apart after their son dies. The man, now a successful lawyer, and the woman, now married and an author, get a chance at reconciliation ten years later.

A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

A woman's seaside vacation takes a dark turn when her obsession with a young mother forces her to confront secrets from her past.

A newly-married woman becomes frustrated as her husband, a reindeer herder for an Arctic village, spends much of his time away. Desperate for affection, she visits a shaman who offers a potion that makes her irresistibly desirable, with unexpected and deadly results.

After discovering her father put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared, 17-year-old Ree Dolly must confront the local criminal underworld and the harsh Ozark wilderness in order to to track down her father and save her family.

When elderly mother Edna inexplicably vanishes, her daughter rushes to the family's decaying home, finding clues of her increasing dementia scattered around the house in her absence.

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.

Thousands of birds flock into a seaside town and terrorize the residents in a series of deadly attacks.

A young witch visits her cousin in a small town during a heated mayoral election race. Her kind-hearted cousin, the town’s beloved “good witch” and newlywed with two teenage step-kids, is running for office, but must keep her family from falling apart when their visitor uses her magic to put them—and the whole town—under her bitter spell.

A burglar falls for an heiress as she dies in his arms. When he learns that he has the gift of reincarnation, he sets out to save her.

While on a last-minute European holiday, a young woman finds herself in the middle of a real-life fairy tale when a chance meeting with a handsome local leads to something more. However, things get complicated when she learns that the "local" is actually a prince who is about to be crowned King, and whose mother is dead-set against her royal son's romance with the tourist.

Townspeople of a small English village begin to die in a series of horrible accidents, and a Scotland Yard inspector arrives to investigate a mysterious local medium who records conversations with the dead.

James and his three closest lifelong friends go on an ill-advised trip to the stunning coastal area of Barafundle Bay in West Wales. What follows is a touching and comical adventure dealing with friendship, heroism and love.

An American oil company sends a man to Scotland to buy up an entire village where they want to build a refinery. But things don't go as expected.

In an attempt to pull her family together, Adèlle travels with her young daughter Sarah to Wales to visit her father. The morning after they arrive, Sarah mysteriously vanishes in the ocean. Not long after, a little girl bearing a striking resemblance to their missing daughter reveals that she has retuned from the dead — and that Sarah has been taken to the Welsh underworld.

Jamie owns a sightseeing and tour company in the small town of Cooperville, New York. Navigating the holidays with enthusiasm is trickier for Jamie since her husband Matt passed. Matt loved Christmas and found unparalleled joy in giving to others. While reminiscing with family, Jamie realizes the town desperately needs someone with Matt’s genius for thinking of the small gestures that bring genuine happiness to the holidays.

On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want?

Young Katya meets a merry company of visiting guys who have a specific entertainment - to organize parties in other people's empty houses. And Katya knows the right place: an old country house on the coast, the owner of which left for a long time. The secluded house, in which the spiritualist salon was at the beginning of the last century, seems to everyone an excellent option. Alarming, even the terrible abandonment of this place does not frighten anyone ... In the midst of the party, someone whom Katya never expected to see appears: the mysterious master of the house ... The man she loved. A man in the grip of otherworldly forces.

Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine. As tensions rise, their seemingly idyllic existence starts to crumble.

Annie Wilson, young widow and mother of three, makes her living foretelling others' futures—though her own has become cloudier than even she can see. Threatened by a client's violent husband and plagued by visions of a missing local woman, Annie finds herself pulled into a thicket of lies and deception in which her extraordinary gift may ultimately get her killed.

Lord Donald and Lady Nancy reside in the magnificent but run-down Longleigh House with James, their mentally disabled adult son. Nancy has fallen seriously ill and Donald is preparing to sell the house to raise enough money to pay for an operation. He arranges for the family nurse, Mary, to take care of Nancy while he leaves to tend to the sale. However, James wants to prove to his father that he can look after his mother on his own and decides to lock Mary out of the house. It isn't long before James starts mixing his mother's pills and forgetting to take his own medication, and as the stress of looking after his mother increases, so too does the severity of his own condition.

Dr. David Marrow invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Marrow is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.

Animated version of the classic Charles Dickens story. Warned by the ghost of his old business partner Marley that his sins would lead to punishment in the afterlife, the cruel and greedy Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future to show him how the course of his life led him to where he is - and where it will lead if he doesn't change his ways.

Aydın is a hotel owner and a retired actor in rural Turkey. As winter emerges he begins navigating the conflicts within the relationships with his wife, sister and existence.

A sudden loss disrupts Carol’s orderly life, propelling her into the dating world for the first time in 20 years. Finally living in the present tense, she finds herself swept up in not one, but two unexpected relationships that challenge her assumptions about what it means to grow old.

Because of the actions of her irresponsible parents, a young girl is left alone on a decrepit country estate and survives inside her fantastic imagination.

London, 1843. Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter old man, despises the Christmas holiday. Over the course of Christmas Eve night he is visited by three ghosts to show him his past, present and future.

A mysterious woman comes in to town and inhabits the local haunted mansion, making everyone wonder if she's a witch or "The Grey Lady".

A spiritualist medium holds a seance for a writer suffering from writers block but accidentally summons the spirit of his deceased first wife which leads to an increasingly complex love triangle with his current wife of five years.

In the Arctic region of Northern Alaska, an oil company's advance team struggles to establish a drilling base that will forever alter the pristine land. After one team member is found dead, a disorientation slowly claims the sanity of the others as each of them succumbs to a mysterious fear.

After a series of tragedies including the death of his father-in-law, Robert and his wife Maia leave their home in London to move back to her childhood home. But when Robert discovers an old portrait in the attic of a man who is his spitting image, he goes down a rabbit hole to discover the identity of this mysterious doppelganger known only as the visitor. It isn’t long until he realizes – where the visitor goes, death follows.

Rachel Carson, a best-selling crime novelist, is devastated and filled with guilt over the accidental death of her son. Hoping that a change of scenery will help alleviate her suffering, she leaves her home in the city and moves into a vacant country house owned by a friend and begins a relationship with charming local Angus. But, just as her life is taking a turn for the better, Rachel realizes she's being romanced by a ghost, leading her to doubt her own sanity.

Michael is a widower who is struggling to adjust to his new role as the sole caretaker of his two children. Still reeling from the death of his wife, he has been plagued by terrifying apparitions. When he volunteers at a local literary festival, he finds himself drawn to Lena, an empathetic author of supernatural fiction. While Lena tries to help Michael with the mystery of his nightmarish visions, she must contend with problems of her own, as she’s being jealously pursued by self-obsessed novelist Nicholas, her one-time lover. As the festival progresses, the three adults’ lives converge and collide.

A schoolteacher moves into her deceased aunt’s house in a small Californian town, and is harassed by unfriendly locals and a mysterious hearse.

After a romantic evening at their secluded lake house, a woman wakes up handcuffed to her dead husband. Trapped and isolated in the dead of winter, she must fight off hired killers to escape her late spouse's twisted plan.

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.

When Steve Coogan is asked by The Observer to tour the country's finest restaurants, he envisions it as the perfect getaway with his beautiful girlfriend. But, when she backs out on him, he has no one to accompany him but his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon.

A nurse taking care of her daughter's mysterious affliction struggles to hide her secrets when uninvited strangers take shelter in her house during a lethal blizzard.

A grandmother has a passionate affair with a man half her age, who is also sleeping with her daughter.

Clover is finishing a veterinary course when her brother dies and she is called home to her family's struggling Somerset farm.

In post–War England, a writer and sometime-ghost hunter investigates a reported haunting at a boys boarding school.

It took Anna 10 years to recover from the death of her husband, Sean, but now she's on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, Joseph, and finally moving on. However, on the night of her engagement party, a young boy named Sean turns up, saying he is her dead husband reincarnated. At first she ignores the child, but his knowledge of her former husband's life is uncanny, leading her to believe that he might be telling the truth.

The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.

In a small, conservative Scottish village, an oilman is paralyzed in an accident. His wife, who prayed for his return, feels guilty; even more, when he urges her to have sex with another.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children, is a renowned linguistics professor who starts to forget words. When she receives a devastating diagnosis, Alice and her family find their bonds tested.

An artist and her elderly mother confront long-buried secrets when they return to a former family home, now a hotel haunted by its mysterious past.

After her boyfriend commits suicide, a young woman attempts to use the unpublished manuscript of a novel and a sum of money he left behind to reinvent her life.

Jack always lands on his feet. He lands on his feet when he marries the beautiful Sarah. He lands on his feet when he buys a luxurious new home. However, when Sarah goes into labour, he takes a tumble down the stairs and lands on his head. When he comes around he discovers he is the proud father of a baby girl, but deficient in the spouse department to the tune of 1.

In a poor Estonian village, a group of peasants use magic and folk remedies to survive the winter, and a young woman tries to get a young man to love her.


