Summary
Setting a movie in one location can create a focused and compelling story that relies on strong character development.
Movies like “Locke,” “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” and “Assault on Precinct 13” showcase how a single location can be utilized effectively to create tension and excitement.
“Wait Until Dark,” “Misery,” and “Rear Window” exemplify how confinement to one location can enhance the suspense and immersive experience for the audience.
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Setting a movie entirely (or almost entirely) in one location takes away all the cinematic frills and forces filmmakers to focus on character and story. One of the biggest advantages that cinema has over theater is the ability to jump between different locations. James Bond movies take audiences all over the globe, Star Wars movies take them across a galaxy far, far away, and Everything Everywhere All at Once takes them to a bunch of parallel universes. But a story can be just as compelling when it’s confined to one place.
Quentin Tarantino would go on to make globetrotting epics like Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, but his first movie was set almost entirely in an abandoned warehouse. Kevin Smith shot his first movie in the convenience store where he was working a day job. From a jury deciding whether to convict a murderer to a cheating husband driving to the birth of his mistress’ baby, some of the greatest stories ever told on-screen have been set in one location.
10 Locke
Steven Wright, 2013
Tom Hardy spends the entirety of Locke in a car on the motorway, speaking to his loved ones on the phone. Although his wife and sons are waiting for him to get home to watch a football match, and he has the biggest job of his career the following day, he decides to drive to London, where his pregnant mistress has gone into premature labor. Hardy’s typically brilliant performance ensures the movie is consistently engaging; Locke plays like a one-man show immortalized on film.
9 Bodies Bodies Bodies
Halina Reijn, 2022
While a bunch of vapid Gen Z kids wait out a hurricane in their friend’s lavish mansion, the power goes out and one of them turns up dead in Bodies Bodies Bodies. Directed by Halina Reijn in her English-language debut, Bodies Bodies Bodies is both a chilling whodunit with a tense atmosphere – lit mostly by the flashlights on the characters’ iPhones – and an incisive satire of modern-day youth culture. The star-studded ensemble is anchored by Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, and a standout Rachel Sennott, and the razor-sharp script leads to a beautifully ironic, totally unexpected twist ending.
8 Assault On Precinct 13
John Carpenter, 1976
John Carpenter reimagines Rio Bravo in a contemporary urban setting in Assault on Precinct 13, as a courageous cop and a dangerous inmate reluctantly team up to protect a police precinct from a ruthless gun-toting gang. After the gonzo sci-fi satire of Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13 introduced audiences to Carpenter’s true cinematic grit. The violence is uncompromising, the pacing is exhilarating, and Carpenter never loses sight of the film’s emotional core: the unlikely friendship that blossoms between its two mismatched heroes.
7 Clerks
Kevin Smith, 1994
Kevin Smith turned his own mundane experiences working at a convenience store into the definitive Gen X comedy with his low-budget black-and-white debut feature Clerks. Clerks chronicles a typical day in the lives of curmudgeonly clerk Dante and his loudmouthed best friend Randal. For about a month, Smith worked at the Quick Stop during the day, then shot his movie there all night. The resulting product was a darling on the festival circuit and quickly became a cult classic, because it perfectly captures the everyday frustrations of working a dead-end job.
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6 Misery
Rob Reiner, 1990
Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name (presumably inspired by his worst nightmare), Misery sees famous author Paul Sheldon being held captive by a psychotic superfan, Annie Wilkes. Keeping the movie confined to the house where Paul is trapped allowed director Rob Reiner to draw the audience into his claustrophobic imprisonment. James Caan gives a compelling everyman turn as Paul and Kathy Bates more than earns her Academy Award – a rare Oscar win for a horror film – with her haunting, iconic performance as Annie.
5 The Breakfast Club
John Hughes, 1985
A bunch of kids are stuck in Saturday detention in John Hughes’ teen comedy classic The Breakfast Club. Hughes used this introspective premise to deconstruct a lot of the high school movie archetypes that he helped to establish. The five kids in detention each belong to a different category of high schooler – a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse – but, as they open up and get to know each other, they realize there’s a lot more to them than those labels would suggest, and they have a lot more in common than it initially seems.
4 Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
James Stewart is an adventurous photographer confined to his apartment with a broken leg in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller masterpiece Rear Window. To conquer the boredom, Jeff starts spying on his neighbors with a high-powered lens and begins to suspect that the man across the courtyard is a murderer. In Rear Window, Hitchcock uses the single-location confinement to enhance the suspense. Since Jeff’s leg is broken, he can’t go anywhere. When the potential murderer is onto him, he can’t just run away – he’s trapped there.
3 Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino, 1992
Before he had the clout to demand $100 million to make a darkly comedic spaghetti western about slavery, Quentin Tarantino made his directorial debut with a modestly budgeted heist movie that doesn’t show the heist. Reservoir Dogs instead focuses on the aftermath of a failed jewelry store robbery in which the crew reconvenes at the rendezvous point and tries to figure out who among them is an undercover cop. Without the money to lean on spectacle, Reservoir Dogs relies on Tarantino’s signature verbose dialogue and non-linear storytelling to keep the audience hooked.
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2 Wait Until Dark
Terence Young, 1967
In Terence Young’s nail-biting thriller Wait Until Dark, Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who unwittingly brings a drug stash home with her. Alan Arkin and Richard Crenna co-star as the gangsters who break in to get it back. Young uses the fact that Susy Hendrix can’t see the intruders – but the audience can – to keep stretching the rubber band of tension. Wait Until Dark rarely leaves Susy’s apartment, but Young’s direction, paired with Henry Mancini’s ominous musical score, keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.
1 12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet, 1957
Adapted from Reginald Rose’s teleplay of the same name, 12 Angry Men revolves around 12 jurors attempting to determine whether they should convict or acquit a teenager accused of murder on the basis of reasonable doubt. There’s nothing exciting or cinematic about serving on a real jury, but director Sidney Lumet and his star-studded cast – led by Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb – make it seem like an emotional rollercoaster. 12 Angry Men’s sharp writing and impeccable acting make it a timeless gem that still holds up today.