Inventory: 10 New Year’s films that almost ruin the year on the first day

The end of the year draws near, which means it’s time for the annual ritual of celebrating how far we’ve come and sharing good tidings for the future—all while battling the fear that we’re too inadequate to make a mark with our ruthlessly linear life. (There’s nothing stopping you verbalizing your existential dread at a New Year’s party but, from experience, we wouldn’t recommend it.) The tension between uncomfortable introspection and enforced social positivity is what makes New Year’s Eve such a dramatically rich holiday: joviality can be undercut with psychological torment, the fear of running out of time can be counteracted with a sudden great change, and the reset calendar allows everyone to cosplay a miniature rebirth and collectively believe that a fresh start is possible.

Often, the countdown to New Year is not the sole concern of a film (unless you are the late Garry Marshall, whose final films were more about their chosen holiday than any works of art made previously, schmaltz and empty sentiment included). The holiday is usually a backdrop, sometimes only featuring in a single scene, that thematically compliments the tense, spiraling, or cathartic journey of the characters. But some movies take the energetic promise of the unknown to chaotic extremes, imbuing their characters with a rush of agency and disorientation that triggers a near-catastrophic start to the year—either by threatening the livelihoods of others or doubling down on one’s own destructive trajectory.

Released earlier this year, Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney’s Y2K cast a bunch of people who weren’t alive for Y2K in a speculative disaster-comedy where the machines actually turn on humanity when it strikes midnight in the year 2000. The film follows a fine tradition of movies that use New Year’s Eve to heighten what it feels like to realize that you may have horrifically dropped the ball the minute the ball drops. Here are 10 films that almost ruin the New Year on day one.

1. Sunset Boulevard

First, some classics. Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a screenwriter grifting on Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a reclusive silent era star who uses Joe’s middling talent to fuel her comeback. He’s happy using her as a meal ticket. Joe is one of the only guests attending Norma’s New Year’s Eve party, where she confesses her desire for him in her uniquely condescending and self-loathing manner. It’s a more promising turning point for Joe than the image that opened the film—his corpse, facedown in Norma’s pool, attended by cops—but the way that he tries to deflect Norma’s NYE advances triggers a chain reaction of delusion that claims his life. Of all the parties on this list, Sunset Boulevard’s has some of the worst vibes: a band plays for no dancers, the inebriated host lists all the material signifiers of her vast wealth, and there’s a palpable sense of being marooned within the ornate but artificial halls.

2. The Poseidon Adventure

Yes, an entire luxury liner sinks in this film, but the vibes of the New Year’s party are tangibly better than those in Sunset Boulevard, despite the eventual difference in body count. Everyone seems to be having a good time before the tsunami! In perfectly ’70s fashion, this crowd-pleasing disaster film is full of world-class talents struggling through sets that can look both hokey and genuinely hazardous (sometimes in the same scene), amping up the sense of disaster after the ship is completely overturned by the rogue wave. Gene Hackman is a dashing preacher leading a band of willing survivors out of the lavish dining room where celebrations were getting underway. After leaving the dining room, all traces of New Year’s cheer evaporate as the chamber begins to fill with water—a swift, violent indication from director Ronald Neame that the rules of conventional social hierarchy will be replaced with pure, urgent survival.

3. The Godfather Part II

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? If you are Michael Corleone, absolutely! In the most pivotal moment in one of the most famous films ever made, crime boss Michael (Al Pacino) realizes his own brother Fredo (John Cazale) is a traitor to the Corleone family at a New Year’s party in Havana. His jacket adorned with confetti, Michael grips his brother in a tight embrace before planting “Il bacio della morte” (the kiss of death) on his lips: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!” The Godfather series prides itself on contrasting the pageantry of public events with violent, internalized conflict, and as Fredo rushes off, the blank stare of the “Feliz Año Nuevo” banner behind the party crowd hammers home the emptiness of Michael’s consolidation of power. In a film that parallels epochs between father (Robert De Niro) and son, that this devastating turning point happens at a celebration of time’s unwavering progression (which is immediately undercut by the arrival of Cuban rebels) is further proof that the only outcome for Michael’s pursuit of era-defining power is total alienation.

4. Terror Train

And thus concludes the discussion of canonized classics—time for some trash. A disposable slasher produced in the wake of Halloween (and even starring Jamie Lee Curtis) that ultimately suffered from a quickly saturated market, Canadian murder-mystery Terror Train sees a costumed killer picking off pre-med students having a New Year’s bash on a moving train. Murder is a surefire way to start the New Year on a bad foot, and a claustrophobic, narrow party location that nobody can leave makes things much worse for the victims. Despite the stagey, tedious stretches of Terror Train, it’s hard to deny that it’s an effectively grim use of the New Year setting. Everyone there is far more likely to prioritize celebrating rather than concede to the threat of a stalking killer, which worsens the isolation of the victims and gives ample room for a murderer to roam free. Plus, this party has David Copperfield doing a magic act!

5. The Hudsucker Proxy

Thirty years after the Coen brothers’ uneven but underrated Big Business screwball satire, it’s clear that Hollywood is sorely lacking in movies about rich people thinking up high-concept scams that end up backfiring for reasons outside their control—in this case, because Tim Robbins is dumb in real but unforeseen ways. The grim portent of the New Year is hammered home from the opening scene, an in media res framing device of Norville Barnes (Robbins), a mailroom-clerk-cum-proxy-president standing on the edge of a skyscraper, ready to end it all. The events of the film unfold over a single month, December 1958, meaning the acceleration of misadventures in the lead up to New Year’s is dialed up at chaotic speeds. But despite Barnes’ suicidal urge when the clock tolls midnight, the film should probably be excluded from this list because of a time-stopping angelic intervention that stops any year-ruining stuff actually taking place on January 1st.

6. Strange Days

A maximalist cyberpunk noir that goes for the jugular on a plethora of cerebral and social issues, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days is set on the same night as Y2K and is equally concerned about our dangerous relationship with technology. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) is a black marketeer who sells the recorded memories and sensations of other people using illicit brain-scanning tech (a “SQUID”) who becomes ensnared in a corrupt cop scandal with bodyguard Mace (Angela Bassett) as the 20th century draws to a close. In Bigelow’s film, the symbolic significance of New Year’s is heightened (doubly so considering it takes place at the dawn of a new millennium), as our characters near an existential cliff edge: How will the future begin, with technology completely absorbed into the fabric of abusive systems, or used as a tool to expose its corrupt hegemony?

7. Boogie Nights

A roving camera oner? In a Paul Thomas Anderson movie? It’s more likely than you think. The ’70s come to an explosive close with a different type of firework in Anderson’s chronicle of Californian porn, as performer Little Bill (William H. Macy) decides he has been emasculated one time too many times by his adulterous wife and performs a murder-suicide that smash cuts to the title-on-black: “’80s.” It’s a funny, shocking, and morbid use of the Kuleshov effect that indicates the wellbeing of our characters and the conditions of their work will now deteriorate. Anderson mirrors the anticipatory buildup and sharp release of the New Year’s countdown with camera blocking that largely trails behind Little Bill as he roams the party, switching to his cold, pained face after he discovers his wife mid-coitus, and trailing behind him again as he retrieves his gun and reenters the fray. When Bill is pushed to action, we feel the pressing need to catch up to clarity before the ball drops. When Bill bloodily takes back control, he supersedes the holiday as the focal point of the party; his to-camera suicide is far more memorable and personal than chants of “Happy New Year!”

8. Assault On Precinct 13

John Carpenter had a bad (but personally lucrative) run of films getting remade from 2005 to 2011, and while this update directed by Jean-François Richet (Mesrine, Plane) does itself no favors by adding half an hour to Carpenter’s lean, Western-tinged siege, the excellent cast (Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello, Gabriel Byrne, and more) does a lot to redeem the misguided project. The remake takes place on the New Year’s Eve graveyard shift, where corrupt cops surround a police station to eliminate a crime boss who could prove they were in business together. Like Strange Days, this genre film uses the language of pulp to inject the long night of New Year’s with anticipation and danger—and the unsteady union between cops and criminals lends the film an ironic sense of unity to mirror the chummy holiday.

9. Snowpiercer

An unorthodox pick, but one that illuminates the arbitrary design of the holiday and the narrative it tries to impose upon us. The setting for Snowpiercer is a perpetually moving train circling a frozen Earth after an icy apocalypse. The train maintains a rigid front-to-back class hierarchy and an undeniable authority as humanity’s sole survival option—but the impoverished, starving tail passengers organize a final revolt to take control of the train’s Sacred Engine. On the Snowpiercer, New Year’s is marked by a complete circumnavigation of the globe, meaning the train is the ultimate arbiter of time, its progression, and its meaning. It’s fitting that the ruling classes deal our revolutionaries a severe, violent blow when the train passes over Yekaterina Bridge and a new year begins—each passing year consolidates the train’s power over reality and reinforces the dependency of its passengers.

10. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

Closing out the list is its most mundane and grounded New Year’s Eve celebration, but writer-director Ben Wheatley sacrifices none of the interpersonal disaster that characterizes many of these films. A loose reworking of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Colin Burstead (frequent Wheatley collaborator Neil Maskell) likes to imagine himself as an authority in his extended family, and to prove it, he hires a country manor for a New Year’s party. When Colin’s exiled brother (Sam Riley) makes an appearance, the thorny theatrics of the Bard unfold with freewheeling, naturalistic tension and skirmishes. As the dynamics of dependency and woundedness flare up inside the manor walls, the hollowness of the celebration is laid bare. This is not about New Year’s Eve, but rather a performance of imbalanced family unity. One by one, the players drop the guise of good cheer in favor of embittered and scathing reproach. The seasonal greeting in the title takes on a grim irony when it becomes clear how little feeling is behind it.