Some might look back at the Covid era with a sense of nostalgia: working from home, no reason to leave the house, lots of movie-watching. But let’s not forget the bad parts either. Lockdowns, toilet paper shortages, and a whole new level of screen addiction which society has yet to recover from.

To mark five years since the first lockdown in Luxembourg, here is a list of films that came out during the period, seem oddly prescient in hindsight, and a spare few that have done a good job grappling with the era’s aftermath.

There’s two categories to consider here: films that predicted the Covid predicament, and films that were made during/are about the pandemic itself. Some are fantastical, some are spot on – but most will likely elicit memories from those early days in March five years ago.

Movies about outbreaks

The mid-2000s zombie fad doesn’t seem so funny now, does it? There’s a wealth of films about outbreaks and the devastating effect they have on human (social) life.

Steven Soderbergh’s medical thriller isn’t his best, but it does sport a stellar cast and an oddly prescient atmosphere. It enjoyed a massive resurgence in popularity in 2020, and British Health Secretary Matt Hancock even cited it as an inspiration in early 2021.

Arguably the zombie movie, 28 Days Later strikes contemporary audiences with its visions of empty streets and looming disaster. Funnily enough, the sequel (28 Weeks Later) is basically about a second round of lockdown.

Humanity was nearly wiped out by a devastating virus, and survivors from the future send a hero back in time to stop it from happening. 12 Monkeys is pretty bonkers, but also touches on the apocalyptic feel many felt in the first few weeks of pandemic of our timeline.

Possibly one of the worst movies made this millenium, The Happening is comfortably in ‘so-bad-it’s-good-territory’, particularly when it comes to Mark Whalberg’s wooden performance. It has something to do with a deadly toxin being released from trees, but the whole thing truthfully does not make sense.

This post-apocalyptic Netflix thriller came out only two years before Covid arrived, and yet feels oddly on the nose. Sandra Bullock lives in a world infested by beings that cause suicide when seen. But if you watched it during the pandemic, it felt like your average trip to the supermarket.

Films about Covid

It was a weird time for everybody. Lots of film productions were paused (and even cancelled) due to the pandemic – meaning that the period was marked by a lot of unique pieces that might’ve otherwise never have been made.

Nothing quite captured that lockdown feeling like Bo Burnham’s singular musical special Inside. Songs about feeling depressed and spending too much time on the internet, all filmed in his small flat, really made you long for the regularness of traffic and dentist appointments.

One side feature of the pandemic was the 2021 Gamestop stock surge. A collective effort by hyper-online denizens of the lockdown world, it’s an essential document of the period – and a warning that getting rich quick on the internet isn’t as easy at it seems.

An early manifestation of Covid-era absurdism, the unexpected sequel to the original Borat sees the disgraced Kazakh journalist wander one of the strangest places on Earth – America – during the early stages of the pandemic.

There are only the subtlest references to any kind of pandemic in Glass Onion – and yet it feels like the most on-the-nose document of Covid culture. The film’s look and feel (as well as its holiday setting) are a crystallisation of the stuff people liked to watch during the pandemic. Besides Bo Burnham’s special, it’s the Covid movie.

This one was ostensibly about the dangers of ignoring climate change, but accidentally became an allegory for Covid skepticism, too. Something about the film’s paranoid energy, coupled with a looming disaster, felt oddly familiar when it came out in 2021.