Pandemic Cinema is a Genre, OTT Niche | COVID Movies Will Keep Trending

The original post went up in January 2020: This was when browsing for a new series to follow after having just wrapped up Good Girls on Netflix that I realized that we are perhaps sitting on one of the biggest movie story inspiring moments - this is not just speculation, but a surety about the things about to come. I feel assured that TV series, web series, documentary series, and many conspiracy theory movie plots will use this pandemic as the main storyline. The ingredients are just about perfect for plot-creators. Just imagine using a Chinese angle in which it is found that the Coronavirus is the result of a man-made engineering effort aimed at displacing the US from its super-power status. Other options include the Coronavirus taking a more serious form and becoming largely airborne. Now, the movie could be about how a family navigates cities razed to the ground by the virus, en route to some form of magical cure that cannot be found anywhere else.

Other options include how the society in the aftermath of the Coronavirus pandemic is divided into two sections - those who can easily afford the immunity and those who are shut off and forced to let fate take over without the means to buy the treatment. Invariably, a hero would arise from these underprivileged sections and challenge the entire system. Closer to home, there could be a storyline where it is found that state governments perhaps allowed the virus to take over towns or regions where they were losing control, using the lockdown to manipulate the environment to overrule the public sentiments. My only advice would be not to turn these stories into something parallel to the zombie movie genre. That line of thought has been overcooked. Right now, on Netflix, there are at least 5 zombie, viral-themed series to choose from. The Corona story type can also include love blossoming in times of social distancing. It can also be about how self-imposed isolation can turn supposedly normal people into the OCD afflicted. It might also be about how cutting away from social interactions can perhaps push a person into meeting the inner demons head-on, and hence, an inner conflict begins. The possibilities are endless...these are just some that come instantly to mind!!

Revisiting it in April 2026 - nearly 5 years since the pandemic started receding and some normalcy started getting restored: 

COVID Films That Are Finally Worth Talking About in 2026 [Pandemic-inspired Cinema is now a growing genre]

Five years later, movies are starting to look back at the pandemic. Some are brilliant. Some are a mess. All of them are trying to say something.

For people in India, this subject is not just historical. We lived through a lockdown announced with four hours' notice. We saw daily wage workers walking hundreds of kilometres on empty highways. We watched oxygen cylinders become more valuable than almost anything else. We received WhatsApp forwards with phone numbers for hospital beds that turned out to be disconnected. The pandemic in India was not one experience — it was several completely different crises happening at the same time to people living in completely different worlds. Any film that wants to cover this subject honestly has a very high bar to clear.

Here is a look at the most important COVID-inspired films of the last few years — where you can watch them, what they actually say, and whether they are worth your time.

Eddington (2025) — Ari Aster, USA

 Available on: OTT release expected in 2026. Theatrical release 2025.

Ari Aster directed the horror films Hereditary and Midsommar, both of which became famous for being deeply unsettling in ways that were hard to explain. His new film, Eddington, is not a horror film, but it is definitely unsettling. The story is set in May 2020, in a small fictional town in New Mexico, USA. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the local sheriff, who does not believe COVID is real and spends most of the film going further and further into conspiracy theories. Pedro Pascal plays Ted Garcia, the town's mayor, who becomes Joe's main opponent. Emma Stone plays Joe's wife, Louise, who slowly starts believing the same nonsense her husband believes.

The film begins as a standoff between the sheriff and the mayor over COVID rules and quickly grows into something much messier — covering racism, protests, social media misinformation, and the general feeling that everyone in America in 2020 had lost their minds simultaneously. Critics were genuinely divided about whether the film says anything meaningful or just recreates the chaos without adding anything to it. One school of thought says that Eddington is the most accurate portrait of what 2020 felt like in America. Another school of thought says it is a very expensive way of showing people something they already remember living through, without actually explaining anything.

For Indian viewers, the specific American setting — mask mandates, the Black Lives Matter protests, small-town gun culture — will feel a bit distant. However, the central idea of a society where nobody trusts anyone, where WhatsApp-style rumours have replaced facts, and where ordinary people turn on each other over things that were never actually in dispute, will feel very familiar. Swap New Mexico for any Indian city in April 2020, and the atmosphere is recognisable.

Should you watch it: Yes, but go in with low expectations for answers. The film asks good questions and deliberately refuses to answer them, which is either courageous filmmaking or a very expensive shrug, depending on your patience.

An Unfinished Film (2024) — Lou Ye, China

Available on: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video

This is the film on this list that deserves the most attention and is currently getting the least. Lou Ye is one of China's most important directors, and also one of its most frequently banned ones. His film begins in late 2019, when a group of filmmakers reassembles near Wuhan to finally complete a film project they had abandoned ten years earlier. Within a few days of starting work, the COVID lockdown began, and none of them could leave. The film mixes real footage from the lockdown — including actual smartphone videos and news clips — with scripted drama in a way that makes it genuinely difficult to tell what is real and what is acted. This sounds like it might be confusing to watch, but it actually works powerfully, because the lockdown itself felt unreal to the people living through it. The confusion in the film matches the confusion of the experience.

An Unfinished Film will never be shown in mainland China. The fact that it was made at all is considered an act of courage. It won the Best Narrative Feature and Best Director awards at the Golden Horse Awards, which are the most important Chinese-language film awards in the world.

For Indian viewers, the film captures something very specific that other pandemic films have missed — the feeling of those first few days when nobody knew what was happening, when normal life stopped without warning and was replaced with something nobody had a name for yet. India had its own version of that experience, and this film understands it better than most Indian films about the subject do.

Should you watch it: Absolutely yes. It is one of the most honest films about the pandemic made anywhere in the world, and it is available on mainstream streaming platforms. This should be on every serious film lover's list.

Caught by the Tides (2024) — Jia Zhangke, China

Available on: Criterion Channel, limited international streaming

Jia Zhangke is considered one of the finest filmmakers working anywhere in the world today. During the COVID years, he went through over two decades of personal footage he had shot since 2001 and wove it into a new film about a woman named Qiaoqiao, played by actress Zhao Tao, and her on-and-off relationship with a man named Guo Bin across twenty years of rapidly changing China. The film covers everything from the early 2000s to the pandemic era, and the COVID section arrives in the final act, when the characters are older, and the country around them has changed almost beyond recognition.

The film holds a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is extremely rare, and critics have called it one of the best films of 2024. It is not, however, an easy watch. It is slow, quiet, and more interested in atmosphere and feeling than in plot. Viewers who have not seen Jia Zhangke's earlier films may find it hard to follow the references he makes to his own previous work.

For Indian viewers who are used to mainstream Bollywood or Hollywood films, Caught by the Tides will require patience. For viewers who are comfortable with arthouse cinema and want something genuinely moving and beautifully made, it is exceptional.

Should you watch it: If you enjoy arthouse films, yes — it is worth every minute. If you prefer mainstream storytelling, start with Kimi or An Unfinished Film instead and come back to this one later.

Kimi (2022) — Steven Soderbergh, USA

Available on: HBO Max / JioCinema in India

Steven Soderbergh is one of Hollywood's most reliable directors, and Kimi is exactly the kind of film he makes well — smart, tightly constructed, and finished before it overstays its welcome. Zoe Kravitz plays Angela Childs, a young woman in Seattle whose anxiety about going outside, which existed before the pandemic, became much worse because of it. She now works from home, monitoring voice recordings for a tech company called KIMI, which is essentially an Amazon Alexa-type product. While listening to a recording, she hears what sounds like a woman being attacked. When she tries to report it, nobody at the company wants to know. She realises the only way to make anyone listen is to leave her apartment and physically go to the company's offices — which means facing the outside world that she has been avoiding for over a year.

The film is 89 minutes long and never wastes a single one of them. Kravitz is very good at it. The pandemic backdrop is not treated as a dramatic device — it is simply part of the world these characters live in, which actually makes it feel more realistic than films that make COVID the entire point. The film also touches on something that many people recognise but rarely say out loud — that the pandemic changed their relationship with public spaces permanently, and that the anxiety of going outside did not simply disappear when the lockdowns ended.

Should you watch it: Yes, and this is the best place to start if you are new to pandemic cinema. It is the most accessible film on this list.

India Lockdown (2022) — Madhur Bhandarkar, India

Available on: ZEE5

Madhur Bhandarkar's film tells four separate stories set during India's first lockdown. A sex worker tries to make her way home. A migrant labourer walks hundreds of kilometres with his family. A wealthy couple finds that forced proximity reveals how little they actually like each other. A middle-class family deals with loss and grief in an empty city. The subject matter is exactly right, and the migrant labourer storyline in particular captures something true and painful about what happened to India's most vulnerable people in March and April 2020.

The film went directly to ZEE5 without a theatrical release, and reviews were generally unkind. Critics pointed out that the film covers the surface of its subjects without going deep enough into any of them, and that Bhandarkar's tendency to make broad emotional statements gets in the way of the quieter, more honest moments.

The bigger problem with the India Lockdown is not what it shows but what it does not show. The oxygen crisis, the second wave, the hospitals turning patients away, the families performing last rites without being allowed to gather — none of this is in the film. It covers the first lockdown in terms of inconvenience and hardship, but it does not fully reckon with the scale of what India experienced across two years of COVID.

Should you watch it: Watch the migrant labourer segment and form your own opinion about the rest.

Bo Burnham: Inside (2021) — Bo Burnham, USA

Available on: Netflix

This is technically a stand-up comedy special, not a film, but leaving it out of any serious discussion of pandemic cinema would be dishonest. Bo Burnham filmed this entirely by himself, in a single room, over the course of one year, during the lockdown. He wrote the songs, performed them, directed the cameras, and edited everything alone. The special follows him through the psychological experience of being isolated — the early creative energy, the slow deterioration, the dark comedy of watching the world fall apart through a screen, and finally something that stops being comedy altogether and becomes a genuine record of a person in distress.

For Indian viewers who spent months in small apartments, watching their mental health quietly worsen while telling everyone they were fine, Inside will feel specific and recognisable in ways that are not always comfortable. The material is sharp, the music is genuinely good, and the moment where it stops being funny is one of the most honest moments in anything produced during the pandemic period.

Should you watch it: Yes. It is the most human document the pandemic produced in any format.

What All These Films Have in Common

These films come from different countries, different directors, and different filmmaking traditions, but they are all trying to do the same thing — make sense of an experience that was too large and too strange to process while it was happening. Hollywood is treating the pandemic as a political story about distrust and social collapse. Chinese cinema is treating it as a disruption of time and memory, as something that inserted a permanent gap into ordinary life. Indian cinema is still searching for its full voice on the subject, having captured individual human stories without yet making the bigger, angrier film that the second wave probably deserves.

None of these approaches is wrong, and none of them is complete. The pandemic was too large for any single film to contain. But the fact that filmmakers across the world are finally making serious work about it, rather than looking away, is itself meaningful. For those of us who lived through it, these films offer something that news coverage and statistics never quite managed — the experience of sitting in a dark room and feeling, for a moment, that someone else understood exactly what those years felt like. That recognition is not a small thing. And the best films on this subject have not been made yet. This is only the beginning.

Where to begin in the increasingly expanding domain of COVID-inspired cinema?

Start with Kimi — it is 89 minutes, immediately engaging, and available on JioCinema. Then move to An Unfinished Film on Prime Video, which is the most emotionally honest film on this list. Watch Eddington when it arrives on OTT — it will divide your opinion, which is exactly what it is designed to do.

COVID Films | Pandemic Cinema | Indian Cinema | Bollywood | Hollywood | India OTT