What They HadMovies like What They Had
- Key Features:
- Alzheimers disease, Family drama, Returning home, Confronting the past, Mother-daughter relationship, Caregiving, Memory loss, Family secrets, Southern setting, Sisterhood, Aging, Loss, Nostalgia
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Drama viewers, Family drama enthusiasts, Viewers interested in stories about aging and memory loss
- Emotional Arc:
- Worry → Reflection → Acceptance
What They Had

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.
What They Had
Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.

A career woman reassesses her parents' lives after she is forced to care for her cancer-stricken mother.

In 1988, a teenage girl's life is thrown into chaos when her mother disappears.

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.

Jon Porter returns to his hometown after the sudden and bizarre death of his mother. He hopes to leave as soon as the funeral is over but it's too late. The sinister forces that caused his sister's brutal murder 30 years ago are back. Jon knows the nightmare can't continue. He must stand up to his fear and exorcise the demons who have risen again to take posession of his beautiful teenage daughter - body and soul.

When Krisha returns to her estranged family for Thanksgiving dinner, past demons threaten to ruin the festivities.

Afflicted with a mysterious disease after surviving an overdose, a woman returns to her childhood home to confront her personal demons but instead discovers a real one.

Sylvia is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life: her daughter, her job, her AA meetings. This is blown open when Saul follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past.

Fiona and Grant have been married for nearly 50 years. They have to face the fact that Fiona’s absent-mindedness is a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. She must go to a specialized nursing home, where she slowly forgets Grant and turns her affection to Aubrey, another patient in the home.

A harsh TV personality, Jennifer, needs a break from her own life, so she hops into a car and drives to a small town mountain retreat. On her way there a blizzard veers off the road and she crashes. When she comes to she has complete amnesia and a friendly passerby takes her in. As time passes she still doesn’t remember who she is and the friendly passerby, a widower himself with three kids, assimilates her into his family. But as she slowly starts remembering who she is, she prefers the new life she’s built in the small town.

On the outside, Helen has it all – a loving family and a successful career – but when her suppressed mental illness resurfaces, the world crumbles around her. Crippled by depression, Helen finds solace through her friendship with Mathilda, a kindred spirit struggling with bipolar disorder.

Due to a near-fatal accident that has left her incapacitated and depleted of her long-term memory, a temporarily wheelchair-bound woman returns home after being abroad for six years accompanied by her bohemian boyfriend, the apparent cause of the accident. Unable to remember her family or her own childhood, she sets out, with the help of her boyfriend, to find the reason for her leaving all those years ago and quickly discovers her relatives may not be as loving as she’d thought

Sandy is a stressed-out, single mom who learns that her ex-husband is marrying a younger woman. Her friend Jesse's parents don't know that she has a family or that her sister, Gabi is married to a woman. Jesse's friend, Kristin, is juggling motherhood of a toddler, a patient boyfriend who keeps proposing, and searching for her biological mother. Bradley is a widower who's trying to raise two daughters on his own, while Miranda is too busy with her career to worry about children. When their respective problems intersect and start coming to a head, the Mother's Day holiday takes on a special meaning for all.

A young couple's love is tested when Sun-jin is diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's disease.

After losing her job, making out with her soon-to-be former boss, and finding out that her daughter plans to spend Thanksgiving with her boyfriend, Claudia Larson faces spending the holiday with her unhinged family.

Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star.

After being diagnosed with dementia, an elderly war veteran is forced by his estranged family to hire a live-in nurse, only to find she harbors a sinister secret.

A US soldier suffers a traumatic brain injury while fighting in Afghanistan and struggles to adjust to life back home in New Orleans. When she meets local mechanic James, the pair begin to forge an unexpected bond.

Two disconnected sisters are summoned to clean out their childhood bedrooms before their parents sell their family home.

Liz McAdams is haunted by the memories of a tornado that destroyed her home 25 years ago. Now a professional storm tracker, she and her family are in danger once again as another devastating twister rapidly gains momentum. Caught in the path of destruction, Liz and her estranged husband struggle to save those they love...

After the premature death of her estranged husband, Emma (Winter) regains custody of their young daughter Isla (Jones) and hopes to rebuild their relationship after many years apart. But when an evil entity begins to torment them, mother and daughter are forced to face the inexplicable presence that inhabits the walls of their new home.

Cara Rudland thought she’d left her Southern roots and troubled family far behind, but returns to the scenic Lowcountry of her childhood summers after losing her job in Chicago. There, she reconnects with her mother Lovie, who has been caring for her young, pregnant friend Toy in her charming beach house.

Although he's now eighty years old, Claude Lherminier is still as imposing as he ever was. But his bouts of forgetfulness and confusion are becoming increasingly frequent. Even so, he stubbornly refuses to admit that anything is wrong. Carole, his oldest daughter, wages a daily and taxing battle to ensure that he's not left on his own. Claude suddenly decides on a whim to go to Florida. What lies behind this sudden trip?

Kate and her daughter Beth live alone in an isolated farmhouse in the woods, but when Kate slowly begins to suspect that something sinister is happening, her motherly instincts are put to the test.

A former alcoholic returns home after ten years in prison for the murder of her husband. As her recollection of the murder returns, things take a different turn.

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.

Claire and her husband find themselves moving back into Claire's childhood home only to have the abusive and traumatic memories of her mother come back to haunt her. As her husband starts to get more work, Claire finds herself mixed up in a fog of past and present with a mysterious figure haunting her memories. What is this small figure that is trying to reach out to her, and what does it want?

Teenagers Rose and Bennett were in love, and then a car crash claimed Bennett's life. He left behind a grieving mother, father and younger brother, and Rose was left all alone. She has no family to turn to for support, so when she finds out she's pregnant, she winds up at the Brewer's door. She needs their help, and although they can't quite admit it, they each need her so they can begin to heal.

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.

What starts as a poignant medical documentary about Deborah Logan's descent into Alzheimer's disease and her daughter's struggles as caregiver degenerates into a maddening portrayal of dementia at its most frightening, as hair-raising events begin to plague the family and crew and an unspeakable malevolence threatens to tear the very fabric of sanity from them all.

A Pulitzer-winning writer grapples with being a widower and father after a mental breakdown, while, 27 years later, his grown daughter struggles to forge connections of her own.

A South Korean woman in her sixties enrolls in a poetry class as she grapples with her faltering memory and her grandson's appalling wrongdoing.

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....

In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.

An old pop singer who has Alzheimer's returns to her old house where she remembers her old days of climbing the stairs of fame and fortune while trying to deal with her older sister who holds her responsible for her ruined life.

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 young girl tries to help her grandfather, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, navigate his increasing forgetfulness, and ends up going on a remarkable adventure with him.

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.

Snow White's mother dies during childbirth, leaving baby Snow and father John for dead on an icy field, who then receives a visit from one of Satan's representatives, granting him three wishes.

Inspired by the incredible true story of a hairdresser who single-handedly rallies an entire community to help a widowed father save the life of his critically ill young daughter.

Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.

Pil-ju, an Alzheimer's patient in his 80s, who lost all his family during the Japanese colonial era, and devotes his lifelong revenge before his memories disappear, and a young man in his 20s who helps him.

After returning to her childhood home, young nun Colleen finds her old room exactly how she left it: painted black and covered in goth and metal posters. Her parents are happy enough to see her, but her brother is living as a recluse in the guesthouse since returning home from the Iraq war.

The story of a son's conflicting memories of his dying father.

Lauren wants to rebuild her community, including her family home, in the aftermath of a devastatingly disastrous storm.

Alabama; 1969: The death of a clan's estranged wife and mother brings together two very different families. The scars of the past hide differences that will either tear them apart or expose truths that could lead to unexpected collisions.

When her teen daughter displays increasingly disturbing behavior after a near death experience, a mother becomes convinced the girl brought something evil back from the other side.

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.

Dolores Claiborne was accused of killing her abusive husband twenty years ago, but the court's findings were inconclusive and she was allowed to walk free. Now she has been accused of killing her employer, Vera Donovan, and this time there is a witness who can place her at the scene of the crime. Things look bad for Dolores when her daughter Selena, a successful Manhattan magazine writer, returns to cover the story.

When architect-turned-recluse Bernadette Fox goes missing prior to a family trip to Antarctica, her 15-year-old daughter, Bee, goes on a quest with Bernadette's husband to find her.

A young man cares for his younger sisters after their mother is imprisoned for murdering their abusive father. When he strikes up an affair with a married woman, long-dormant family secrets bubble to the surface.

As Constance (Natasha Richardson) and Nina (Toni Collette) gather at the deathbed of their mother, Ann (Vanessa Redgrave), they learn for the first time that their mother lived an entire other lifetime during one evening 50 years ago. In vivid flashbacks, the young Ann (Claire Daines) spends one night with a man named Harris (Patrick Wilson), who was the love of her life.

The lives of three women have a commonality: adoption. Karen is a physical therapist who regrets that, as a teenager, she gave up her daughter for adoption. Elizabeth was an adopted child and is now a successful lawyer, but her personal life lacks warmth. Lucy and her husband have failed to conceive and now hope to adopt a baby to make their family complete.

After returning home from an extended tour in Afghanistan, a decorated U.S. Army medic and single mother struggles to rebuild her relationship with her young son.

A young woman is returned home to her biological parents after living with her abductor for 17 years.

Sarah Huttinger's return home with her fiance convinces her that the sedate, proper, country-club lifestyle of her family isn't for her – and that maybe the Huttinger family isn't even hers – as she uncovers secrets that suggest the Huttingers are neither sedate nor proper.

Clara and her two sons escape from her abusive husband with little more than their car and plan to start over in New York. After the car towed away, the family meets Alice, who gets them into an emergency shelter. While stealing food at a Russian restaurant called ‘Winter Palace’, Clara meets Marc, who has been given the chance to help the old eatery regain its former glory. The ‘Winter Palace’ soon becomes a place of unexpected encounters between people who are all undergoing some sort of crisis and whom fate has now brought together.

Happy young married couple Paige and Leo are, well, happy. Then a car accident puts Paige into a life-threatening coma. Upon awakening she has lost the previous five years of memories, including those of her beloved Leo, her wedding, a confusing relationship with her parents, or the ending of her relationship with her ex-fiance. Despite these complications, Leo endeavors to win her heart again and rebuild their marriage.

A bride's divorced parents find their old feelings for each other during the wedding reception and over the course of the next few days upsetting the newlywed's honeymoon.

Brought together at their childhood home over their dying mother, an estranged family is thrust into a deadly fight for their own survival.

Together for 20 years, a couple that has grown apart over time receives difficult news that will impact the entire family. As they try to make sense of the changes, they end up rediscovering their love for one another.

Bill is an ailing larger-than-life father being taken care of by his son Sam, who has returned home to care for him. While home, Sam falls for a local woman, Kate. At the same time, Bill starts to fall for her mom, Tina.

A fatally ill mother with only two months to live creates a list of things she wants to do before she dies without telling her family of her illness.

A privileged rich debutante and a cynical struggling entertainer share a turbulent, but strong childhood friendship over the years.

Rose spends her days fishing near the beautiful lake house she’s called home for 50 years. She’s not getting any younger and her daughter Patti worries about Rose being all alone, but the stubborn matriarch will not sell. There are memories here that she doesn’t want to leave. These come flooding back one weekend during a visit from Patti and granddaughter Allison, when a long-forgotten roll of film reminds Rose of the summer she met and fell in love with the bold and beautiful Louise.

Elderly woman Berthe leaves her house to live with her daughter Emilie. Emilie and her brother Antoine had a falling out three years ago and have not seen each other since, but Emilie invites him for Christmas. Memories will resurface and impact both Berthe's destiny and the strange relationship between Emilie and Antoine.

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?

A former serial killer with Alzheimer's fights to protect his daughter from her mysterious boyfriend who may be a serial killer too.

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

An aging, booze-addled father takes a trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim what he believes to be a million-dollar sweepstakes prize.

A business mogul runs into his old small town girlfriend while she is visiting the big city only to find out that they had a child together that he was unaware of.

Amanda and her daughter live a quiet life on an American farm, but when the remains of her estranged mother arrive from Korea, Amanda becomes haunted by the fear of turning into her own mother.

A recent widow invites her husband's troubled best friend to live with her and her two children. As he gradually turns his life around, he helps the family cope and confront their loss.

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.

After a bad breakup with his girlfriend leaves him heartbroken, Carter Webb moves to Michigan to take care of his ailing grandmother. Once there, he gets mixed up in the lives of the mother and daughters who live across the street.

With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person responsible for the death of his family.

David, a struggling comedy writer fresh off from breaking up with his boyfriend, moves from New York City to Sacramento to help his sick mother. Living with his conservative father and much-younger sisters for the first time in ten years, he feels like a stranger in his childhood home. As his mother’s health declines, David frantically tries to extract meaning from this horrible experience and convince everyone (including himself) that he's "doing okay.”

Joanna Mills has a successful career but feels her personal life is spinning out of control. She has few friends, an estranged father, and a crazy ex-boyfriend who is stalking her. Joanna begins having terrifying visions of a woman's murder, and it seems that she is the killer's next target. Determined to solve the mystery and escape her apparent fate, Joanna follows her visions to the victim's hometown and finds that some secrets just do not stay buried.

After colliding with a pedestrian on her bicycle who loses his memory following the accident, Darcy Archer becomes determined to help the handsome guy figure out who he is. In the process, she finds out a lot more about who she is, what she wants from life, and how this too-good-to-be-true guy might just be the man she’s been waiting to bump into all her life.

Beth, Calvin, and their son Conrad are living in the aftermath of the death of the other son. Conrad is overcome by grief and misplaced guilt to the extent of a suicide attempt. He is in therapy. Beth had always preferred his brother and is having difficulty being supportive to Conrad. Calvin is trapped between the two trying to hold the family together.

After having to quarantine together during COVID-19, a mother and daughter are forced to confront their personal obstacles and relationship tensions.

Wealthy American housewife Mary Morgan takes her bullied son George out of school for home education,including a trip to Southern Africa. Whilst in Mozambique George is bitten by a mosquito which crawls through a hole in his net and dies of malaria. After his funeral at home Mary feels a compulsion to return to Africa where she meets English woman Martha O'Connell,whose 24 year old son Ben, a teacher with voluntary service overseas,has also died of malaria. Ben gave his net to one of his pupils,believing adults cannot catch malaria. The two women are shocked to see the high death rate caused by the disease and,whilst Martha stays in Africa as a voluntary helper,Mary petitions the American government to change things. Martha turns up at Mary's house unannounced and,helped by Mary's ex-diplomat father,they address a senate committee on health spending,persuading them to do more to combat malaria. They meet with some success though a coda states that much more can be done.

Emma and Jesse are living the perfect life together, until Jesse disappears in a tragic helicopter crash on their first wedding anniversary. Four years later, Emma has found happiness again and is about to marry her best friend when Jesse resurfaces, turning her world upside down and leaving her torn between two great loves.

An English teacher and struggling single mother has her life disrupted when the father who abandoned her as a child comes back into her life.

Painful memories arise when Kai Koss inherits his dead mother's house and goes back to his childhood home after 19 years.

A drama centered on a classical pianist who has been diagnosed with ALS and the brash college student who becomes her caregiver.

Jess, a newly separated mother and nurse, moves into her old family farmhouse with Tyler, her teenage daughter, and Owen, her eight-year-old son. One night, the family dog senses something in the woods and runs off to find it. He returns a couple of days later and attacks Owen, savagely biting him before Jess is able to intervene. Owen is rushed to the hospital. His condition worsens, and no one can figure out why... until Jess discovers a disturbing cure...

Two families' idyllic ice-fishing vacation turns deadly when they awaken a creature beneath the frozen lake, forcing them to rely on each other if they want to make it safely back to land.

Jane is a single mother dead set on protecting her teenage daughter Betsy from the harsh realities of life. When Betsy falls in love with an enlisted man, Jane tries her best to steer Betsy away from heartache. Little does Jane realize she and her daughter are about to learn important lessons of the heart and that taking chances can sometimes lead to the most extraordinary happy endings.

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.

After their mother passes away, sisters Nicole and Annie reluctantly return to their childhood home to pay their last respects. While staying overnight in the house, the sisters sense a mysterious presence in their midst: noises startling them in the night, objects moving about, a fallen picture of an unknown woman posed next to their mother. Annie begins experiencing a series of intense and disturbing dreams - visions that lead her to uncover something terrible about her mother's past that is finally revealing itself.

A woman's life is thrown into chaos after a freak car accident sends her husband and brother-in-law into comas. Thrills arrive after the brother-in-law wakes up, thinking he's his brother.

A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.

After his older brother passes away, Lee Chandler is forced to return home to care for his 16-year-old nephew. There he is compelled to deal with a tragic past that separated him from his family and the community where he was born and raised.

Struggling to provide her daughters with a safe, happy home, Sandra decides to build one - from scratch. Using all her ingenuity to make her ambitious dream a reality, Sandra draws together a community to lend a helping hand to build her house and ultimately recover her own sense of self.

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.



