Published February 2, 2026 02:48PM
Maybe it’s the mid-winter gloom talking, or maybe it’s just that I’ve spent the last six months doom-scrolling inside a climate-controlled box, but I find myself craving a very specific kind of movie right now. I’m not looking for Sorkin-esque banter or parlor room dramas. I want to watch a person stand in front of a mountain and realize they are completely, utterly insignificant.
Oscar season is usually a loud affair, but this year, the quiet is doing the heavy lifting. If you look closely at the race, you’ll notice a distinct shift in how our best filmmakers are treating the great outdoors. Leading the pack is Train Dreams, the meditative wilderness epic that just earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It features Joel Edgerton—fresh off a Golden Globe nomination for the role—as a grief-stricken laborer retreating into the American West. It’s a performance that gives audiences a Terrence Malick-style communion between character and landscape, where nature acts as co-star, antagonist, and ultimately, salvation.
But Train Dreams isn’t an anomaly; it’s part of a movement. In some of this year’s best films, the wild isn’t just a pretty backdrop or a place to find yourself in the Eat Pray Love sense. It is an indifferent, ancient force. It’s the supporting actor that refuses to let you ignore it.
For those of us who prefer our cinema with a side of existential awe, here are new films where going outside isn’t just the setting—it’s the whole point.
Train Dreams
Table of Contents
The Vibe: The Revenant meets A River Runs Through It
This is the definitive wilderness drama of 2025. Based on Denis Johnson’s spare, devastating novella, Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, an early-20th-century laborer who loses his family and vanishes into the forests of Idaho. What follows isn’t survival—it’s something closer to dissolving. The film captures the American wilderness not as romantic escape but as witness: indifferent, ancient, clarifying. The woods don’t heal Grainier so much as absorb him, and there’s something profound in watching a man become small enough against that landscape to finally see clearly. Nature’s real gift here is honest perspective.
Where to watch: Netflix
The Gorge
The Vibe: Cliffhanger meets cosmic horror
Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play elite snipers stationed in watchtowers on opposite sides of a massive, classified chasm—think Mariana Trench but landlocked and possibly supernatural. Scott Derrickson leans into pulpy genre thrills, but what sticks with you is the sheer verticality: the gorge as void, as the ultimate Other. It’s nature weaponized, turned into a prison of sky and stone. The outdoors here isn’t nurturing—it’s the abyss you’re paid to stare into, which is maybe the perfect metaphor for any job that asks you to ignore what’s right in front of you. Popcorn cinema, sure, but the kind that understands isolation.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Avatar: Fire and Ash
The Vibe: The ultimate big-screen nature spectacle
James Cameron’s third Pandora expedition pivots to volcanic biomes and the so-called “Ash People,” and yes, it’s as visually maximal as you’d expect. Love it or hate it, no franchise spends more money rendering digital ecology—lava tubes, thermal vents, bioluminescent ecosystems thriving in destruction. For all its CGI excess, the thematic core remains stubbornly earnest: Indigenous stewardship versus extractive violence, nature as sacred versus resource. Cameron treats his invented worlds with field biologist reverence. The irony? The most expensive nature film ever made exists mostly on hard drives. But you know what? It works.
Where to watch: In theaters now
Vermilion
The Vibe: Quiet, devastating Alpine beauty
Set in a remote Italian mountain village during WWII’s final days, Maura Delpero’s film lets the Alps do what they do best: isolate, elevate, enforce silence. The snow here isn’t postcard-pretty—it’s a fact of life, a barrier, enforced solitude. This is slow cinema for people who understand that thin air changes how you think, that altitude imposes a specific quality of light. The mountains aren’t villains; they’re simply the terms of existence, and humans arrange their lives accordingly.
Where to watch: VOD / Limited Theaters now
Flow
The Vibe: Wall-E but with animals in a flooded world
A dialogue-free animated gem following a cat navigating a post-human Earth reclaimed by water. Director Gints Zilbalodis resists easy anthropomorphizing, letting instinct and wordless cooperation tell the story. What emerges feels like a nature documentary as myth—the world after us, indifferent to our absence, already adapting. Rivers reclaim cities, animals learn new rules, and somehow it’s not depressing. It’s oddly hopeful, actually—a reminder that nature doesn’t mourn our departure. It just gets back to work.
Where to watch: Hulu
Hamnet
The Vibe: Grief, gardens, and the English countryside
Chloé Zhao brings her Nomadland eye for natural light and lived-in landscapes to Shakespeare’s family tragedy—specifically the death of his son. Filmed in the actual English countryside with Zhao’s signature immersive gaze, Hamnet explores whether the natural world can actually heal unbearable loss, or if it just gives you something beautiful to look at while time does the heavy lifting. Nature here isn’t symbolic. It’s practical. Herbs are medicine. Soil is therapy. Walking becomes ritual. It’s a portrait of how people leaned on the physical world long before “touching grass” was a thing.
Where to watch: In theaters now
Frankenstein
The Vibe: Gothic horror on ice
Guillermo del Toro’s long-gestating adaptation foregrounds Mary Shelley’s Arctic framing device, staging the final pursuit across frozen expanses where ambition meets entropy. The ice is sublime in the old Romantic sense: gorgeous, lethal, utterly indifferent. Civilization collapses quickly out here. So do excuses. Del Toro understands that the North is something brutal and philosophical. Everything brittle about humanity snaps in the cold.
Where to watch: Netflix
