The World to ComeMovies like The World to Come
- Key Features:
- Historical drama, American frontier, 19th century, Female friendship, Isolation, Grief, Loss, Rural setting, Marriage, Emotional connection, Intimacy, Diary, Melancholy, Existentialism
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Drama enthusiasts, Historical fiction fans, Independent film viewers, Character-driven stories
- Emotional Arc:
- Longing → Connection → Loss
The World to Come

In 1856, two women forge a close connection despite their isolation on the American frontier.
The World to Come
Nineteen year old pioneer woman Marty has recently married. She goes west with her husband Clem, hoping to start a new life. But Clem unexpectedly dies, and Marty finds herself alone, two months pregnant. Widower Clark offers her a marriage of convenience: she needs food and money, and he needs someone to take care of his daughter Missie. She accepts his proposal as a temporary solution.

Lizzy is a tough, resourceful frontierswoman settling a remote stretch of land on the 19th-century American frontier. Isolated from civilization in a desolate wilderness where the wind never stops howling, she begins to sense a sinister presence that seems to be borne of the land itself, and when a newlywed couple arrive at a nearby homestead, their presence amplifies Lizzy's fears, setting into motion a shocking chain of events.

Edee, in the aftermath of an unfathomable event, finds herself unable to stay connected to the world she once knew and in the face of that uncertainty, retreats to the magnificent, but unforgiving, wilds of the Rockies. After a local hunter brings her back from the brink of death, she must find a way to live again.

In a rural Appalachian community haunted by the legacy of a Civil War massacre, a rebellious young man struggles to escape the violence that would bind him to the past.

In the 1800s frontier, Missie Davis is a bright and beautiful schoolteacher whose love for the prairie is matched only by her passion for books. When Missie encounters Grant, a handsome New England railroad executive, she feels as though she's met a hero from one of her novels.

In the wake of a school tragedy, Vada, Mia and Quinton form a unique and dynamic bond as they navigate the never linear, often confusing journey to heal in a world that feels forever changed.

Three strong-willed women strive to forge their own paths amidst the wide-open plains of the American Northwest: a lawyer forced to subdue a troubled client; a wife and mother whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a lonely ranch hand who forms an ambiguous bond with a young law student.

When a young rancher crosses paths with a Lakota girl from a nearby reservation, her mysterious disappearance sparks a search that uncovers a harrowing past and hints at a dire future.

There's a deficit of good, honest women in the West, and Roy Whitman wants to change that. His solution is to bring a caravan of over 100 mail-order brides from Chicago to California. It will be a long, difficult and dangerous journey for the women. So Whitman hires hardened, cynical Buck Wyatt to be their guide across the inhospitable frontier. But as disaster strikes on the trail, Buck just might discover that these women are stronger than he thinks.

In the Old West, a 17-year-old Scottish boy teams up with a mysterious gunman to find the woman with whom he is infatuated.

Two women retreat to a lake house to get a break from the pressures of the outside world, only to realize how disconnected from each other they have become, allowing their suspicions to bleed into reality.

A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.

Under small-town scrutiny, a withdrawn farmer’s daughter forges an intimate friendship with a worldly but reckless new girl in 1960s Oklahoma.

With their father away as a chaplain in the Civil War, Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy grow up with their mother in somewhat reduced circumstances. They are a close family who inevitably have their squabbles and tragedies. But the bond holds even when, later, male friends start to become a part of the household.

A Texan traveling across the wild West bringing the news of the world to local townspeople, agrees to help rescue a young girl who was kidnapped.

In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.

When a young mother's home birth ends in unfathomable tragedy, she begins a year-long odyssey of mourning that fractures relationships with loved ones in this deeply personal story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss.

A prospector sells his wife and daughter to another gold miner for the rights to a gold mine. Twenty years later, the prospector is a wealthy man who owns much of the old west town named Kingdom Come. But changes are brewing and his past is coming back to haunt him. A surveyor and his crew scouts the town as a location for a new railroad line and a young woman suddenly appears in the town and is evidently the man's daughter.

After learning that his terminally ill wife has six months to live, a man welcomes the support of his best friend who moves into their home to help out.

Based on a true story, this riveting western follows a headstrong New York widow as she journeys west to meet Sioux chief Sitting Bull, facing off with an army officer intent on war with Native Americans.

A drama centered on two women who engage in a dangerous relationship during South Africa's apartheid era.

A pistol-packing teen meets an unstable rebel and a cocaine-snorting drifter as she hitchhikes her way out West.

A mountain man who wishes to live the life of a hermit becomes the unwilling object of a long vendetta by Indians when he proves to be the match of their warriors in one-to-one combat on the early frontier.

Maureen Trant and her younger sibling Dani share a strong connection, but local boy Court Foster threatens to throw their bond off balance. Dani and Court meet first and have a flirtatious rapport -- but when he meets Maureen, he falls hard and they begin a passionate affair. The new couple try to keep their love hidden from Dani, but she soon learns the truth, disavowing her sister. But a heartbreaking accident later reunites the girls.

A near-penniless drifter's journey to Alaska in search of work is interrupted when she loses her dog while attempting to shoplift food for it.

Faced with the decision of a lifetime, Arvilla Holden enlists her two best friends and sets off in a vintage '66 Bonneville convertible to deliver her late husband's ashes to Santa Barbara.

School nurse Alice Goodwin lives with her husband and two daughters on a dairy farm in a small Wisconsin community. After an accident on her property involving a friend's child, the town turns against her and Alice finds herself fighting charges of child abuse.

Two sisters find their already strained relationship challenged as a mysterious new planet threatens to collide with Earth.

America is in the depths of the Great Depression. Families drift apart when faraway jobs beckon. A courageous young girl confronts overwhelming odds when she embarks on a cross-country search for her father. During her odyssey, she forms a close bond with two diverse traveling companions: a magnificent, protective wolf, and a hardened drifter.

A recently widowed traveler is kidnapped by a cold blooded killer, only to escape into the wilderness where she is forced to battle against the elements as her pursuer closes in on her.

In Northern Norway during the 1860s, a little girl named Dina accidentally causes her mother's death. Overcome with grief, her father refuses to raise her, leaving her in the care of the household servants. Dina grows up wild and unmanageable, with her only friend being the stable boy, Tomas. She summons her mother's ghost and develops a strange fascination with death as well as a passion for living.

Soon to be a father, Mark feels the pressure of domestic responsibility closing in, so he is more than happy to accept when his old friend Kurt proposes a camping trip in the Oregon wilderness. During their time together, the men come to grips with the changes in their lives and the effect on their relationship.

As an asteroid nears Earth, a man finds himself alone after his wife leaves in a panic. He decides to take a road trip to reunite with his high school sweetheart. Accompanying him is a neighbor who inadvertently puts a wrench in his plan.

A group of women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony's men.

In 1859, families discover the lure of the Old West as they settle in territories from Wyoming to Kansas. Meanwhile, a gruff cowboy finds himself on the run with a prostitute and a young boy after killing a fellow gunman.

Two young horse traders guide a Mormon wagon train to the San Juan Valley and encounter rugged terrain, the cutthroat Clegg gang, hospitable Navajo, and moral challenges on the journey.

Five teenage girls navigate the twists and turns of their complicated emotional lives, and learn the secrets of the heart through their friendship.

The mother of a severely traumatized daughter enlists the aid of a unique horse trainer to help the girl's equally injured horse.

An intimate story of the enduring bond of friendship between two hard-living men, set against a sweeping backdrop: the American West, post-World War II, in its twilight. Pete and Big Boy are masters of the prairie, but ultimately face trickier terrain: the human heart.

Nola grew up living on a van with her father, Clint; two nomads against the world. When tragedy strikes, Nola must confront the reality of life on the road alone, learning to own her grief, her past and her new destination.

When rancher and single mother of two Maggie Gilkeson sees her teenage daughter, Lily, kidnapped by Apache rebels, she reluctantly accepts the help of her estranged father, Samuel, in tracking down the kidnappers. Along the way, the two must learn to reconcile the past and work together if they are going to have any hope of getting Lily back before she is taken over the border and forced to become a prostitute.

A young grandmother in a small Pennsylvania town raises her daughter's child after the girl disappears. All the while, a desperate search for her continues.

A young woman held in captivity discovers the realities of truth and lies in the outside world.

At a crossroads after her divorce, a schoolteacher ventures toward a fresh start in life — and love — when she signs up for a grueling group hiking trip.

Two quirky, cynical teenaged girls try to figure out what to do with their lives after high school graduation. After they play a prank on an eccentric, middle aged record collector, one of them befriends him, which causes a rift in the girls’ friendship.

In the last days of a dying logging town, Christian returns to his family home for his father Henry’s wedding. While home, Christian reconnects with his childhood friend Oliver, who has stayed in town working at Henry’s timber mill and is now out of a job. As Christian gets to know Oliver’s wife Charlotte, daughter Hedvig, and father Walter, he discovers a secret that could tear Oliver’s family apart.

A logger leads a life of quiet grace as he experiences love and loss during an era of monumental change in early 20th-century America.

After a comet releases a mysterious virus that begins to kill all of the women in the world, a young couple's relationship is severely tested. They hide out (from both the illness and the savages who hunt the remaining women) in their over-sterilized apartment. Ultimately the duo escapes their self-imposed quarantine to head to the wilderness.

Neglected by her husband, Sarah embarks on an impromptu road trip with her young daughter and her best friend, Mindy. Along the way, the dynamic between the two friends intensifies before circumstances force them apart. Years later, Sarah attempts to rebuild their intimate connection in the days before Mindy’s wedding.

In a remote woodland cabin, a small town doctor discovers Nell — a beautiful young hermit woman with many secrets.

Nathalie teaches philosophy at a high school in Paris. She is passionate about her job and particularly enjoys passing on the pleasure of thinking. Married with two children, she divides her time between her family, former students and her very possessive mother. One day, Nathalie’s husband announces he is leaving her for another woman. With freedom thrust upon her, Nathalie must reinvent her life.

Ella Connors is a single woman who gets pressured to sell her failing cattle farm to her corrupt ex-suitor, Jacob Ewing. She asks for help from her neighbor, Frank Athearn. As Ella and Frank fight back through stampedes, jealousy, betrayal, and sabotage... they eventually find love.

In the prehistoric past, Keda, a young and inexperienced hunter, struggles to return home after being separated from his tribe when bison hunting goes awry. On his way back he will find an unexpected ally.

Wealthy rancher Bick Benedict and dirt-poor cowboy Jett Rink both woo Leslie Lynnton, a beautiful young woman from Maryland who is new to Texas. She marries Benedict, but she is shocked by the racial bigotry of the White Texans against the local people of Mexican descent. Rink discovers oil on a small plot of land, and while he uses his vast, new wealth to buy all the land surrounding the Benedict ranch, the Benedict's disagreement over prejudice fuels conflict that runs across generations.

A woman inexplicably finds herself cut off from all human contact when an invisible, unyielding wall suddenly surrounds the countryside. Accompanied by her loyal dog Lynx, she becomes immersed in a world untouched by civilization and ruled by the laws of nature.

A woman with a tragic past decides to start her new life by hiking for one thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Ralph Burton is a miner who is trapped for several days as a result of a cave-in. When he finally manages to dig himself out, he realizes that all of mankind seems to have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. He travels to New York City only to find it deserted. Making a life for himself there, he is flabbergasted to eventually find Sarah Crandall, who also managed to survive. Together, they form a close friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. At this point, tensions rise between the three, particularly between Thacker, who is white, and Burton, who is black.

The lives of two Danish families cross each other, and an extraordinary but risky friendship comes into bud. But loneliness, frailty and sorrow lie in wait.

A drama about explorer John Smith and the clash between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century.

A young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s struggle to come to terms with their personal problems while trying to raise their two children. Based on a novel by Richard Yates.

Follows the tale of a young woman’s sexual awakening and subsequent journey around the world in pursuit of her ideal lover. Encounters include an Arabian sheik and a Spanish bullfighter. Her friend and butler accompany her and help to arrange her couplings.

Captives of the very relationships that define and sustain them, nine women resiliently meet the travails and disappointments of life.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Trapped on her family’s isolated farm, Pearl must tend to her ailing father under the bitter and overbearing watch of her devout mother. Lusting for a glamorous life like she’s seen in the movies, Pearl’s ambitions, temptations, and repressions collide.

A simple yet proud rancher conspires to murder his wife for financial gain, convincing his teenage son to participate.

A young husband and wife must fight to return home in a post-apocalyptic mid-western landscape ravaged by gangs.

In 1840s England, palaeontologist Mary Anning and a young woman sent by her husband to convalesce by the sea develop an intense relationship. Despite the chasm between their social spheres and personalities, Mary and Charlotte discover they can each offer what the other has been searching for: the realisation that they are not alone. It is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.

Outside the Australian town of Jindabyne, local man Stuart Kane is on a fishing trip with friends when they discover the body of a murdered girl.

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

In an attempt to move on from the death of Paul, the love of her life, Korine leaves Paris to undertake a project in Mongolia. But after meeting the shaman, Oyun, her trip takes a different direction. Korine has a rare gift that Oyun intends to unveil. She agrees to initiate herself in the practice of Shamanism, leading her to discover an ancient and forgotten culture, but most importantly herself.

Will Penny, an aging cowpoke, takes a job on a ranch which requires him to ride the line of the property looking for trespassers or, worse, squatters. He finds that his cabin in the high mountains has been appropriated by a woman whose guide to Oregon has deserted her and her son. Too ashamed to kick mother and child out just as the bitter winter of the mountains sets in, he agrees to share the cabin until the spring thaw. But it isn't just the snow that slowly thaws; the lonely man and woman soon forget their mutual hostility and start developing a deep love for one another.

North Carolina mountains at the end of the 1920s – George and Serena Pemberton, love-struck newly-weds, begin to build a timber empire. Serena soon proves herself to be equal to any man: overseeing loggers, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving a man’s life in the wilderness. With power and influence now in their hands, the Pembertons refuse to let anyone stand in the way of their inflated love and ambitions. However, once Serena discovers George’s hidden past and faces an unchangeable fate of her own, the Pemberton’s passionate marriage begins to unravel leading toward a dramatic reckoning.

Retreating from life after a tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.

An odyssey through time and memory, centered on a place in New Jersey where—from wilderness, and then, later, from a home—love, loss, struggle, hope and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.

A Swedish immigrant family struggles to adapt to their new life on the American frontier during the second half of the 19th century amidst civil war, native uprising and the lure of gold in California.

With only a year left to live, 17-year-old Akito finds new meaning in life by bringing joy to a terminally ill girl who has just six months remaining.

A woman embarks on a journey alone across the United States after fleeing from her violent husband.

Two outsiders, both shaped by the circumstances that have brought them together, forge a deep and lasting love.

Set in postwar America, a man watches his seemingly perfect life fall apart as his daughter's new political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.

A woman during the Second World War opens her heart to an evacuee after initially resolving to be rid of him.

A superstitious servant girl - who has foreboding nightmares about a naked man on horseback - comes to live with a solitary female artist at her country chateau. As the artist takes the girl under her wing, a sensuous relationship develops between them.

To escape her abusive boyfriend, Kat joins a wilderness expedition with a group of women, all of whom are struggling with the uncertainty of life. What was supposed to be an opportunity for personal discovery quickly becomes a fight for survival, forcing each one to discover the strength within themselves that they didn't even know they possessed. While being brazenly chased by a pack of predators, the strong quickly set themselves apart from the weak. In a battle of will, stamina, and heart, these very virtues present themselves at the most crucial moment. With death looming, each is left with what is truly important - the strength within oneself.

Three friends form a bond over the year, Johnathan is gay, Clare is straight and Bobby is neither, instead he loves the people he loves. As their lives go on there is tension and tears which culminate in a strong yet fragile friendship between the three.

While waiting for her divorce papers, a repressed literature professor finds herself unexpectedly attracted by a carefree, spirited young woman named Cay.

What would you do on the last day on Earth? With the end of the world only hours away, the self-absorbed James heads to the ultimate party-to-end-all-parties. On his way there, he saves the life of a young girl named Rose who is searching desperately for her missing father. This simple act sets James on a path to redemption.

Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces firsthand.

Stoic and heartbroken, Einar Gilkyson quietly lives in the rugged Wyoming ranchlands alongside his only trusted friend, Mitch Bradley. One day, the woman he blames for the death of his only son arrives at his door broke, desperate and with a granddaughter he's never known. But even as buried anger and accusations resurface, the way is opened for unexpected connection, adventure and forgiveness.

The life of a woman is transformed after she is diagnosed with a terminal disease, fired from her job and abandoned by her boyfriend. Given two months to live, she throws caution to the wind to pursue her dreams.

A group of Italian villagers struggle to survive during a tumultuous time in 1943, debating how much assistance to give the partisans with the impending arrival of the Germans. Based on True Events.

Four former harlots try to leave the wild west (Colorado, to be exact) and head north to make a better life for themselves. Unfortunately someone from Cody's past won't let it happen that easily.

A young woman who is determined to maintain her independence finds herself at odds with her family who wants her to tame her wild side and get married.

Four best friends negotiate loss and major life changes during the last two weeks of high school.

Tells the life story of Danish author Karen Blixen, who at the beginning of the 20th century moved to Africa to build a new life for herself. The film is based on her 1937 autobiographical novel.

In 1950s Mexico City, William Lee, an American ex-pat in his late forties, leads a solitary life amidst a small American community. However, the arrival in town of Eugene Allerton, a young student, stirs William into finally establishing a meaningful connection with someone.

Traumatized by a fishing boat accident many years before, Joe Gastineau has given up his hopes for a life beyond the odd jobs he takes to support himself. That quickly changes when nomadic club singer Donna de Angelo and her troubled teen-age daughter enter Joe’s life. Both mother and daughter fall for Joe, increasing the friction between them. The tension continues to build when Joe invites them on a pleasure cruise up the Alaskan coast, discovering too late that the trip may cost them their lives.




