Existentialism in Film: A Beginner's Map

Existentialism sounds like homework. A cluster of stern European men, thick books, words like "being" and "nothingness." But you have already felt it, probably in a cinema hall in Ahmedabad with a cold drink going flat in your hand, in the moment a film made you sit very still because a character on screen just faced the one question you keep dodging: what is any of this for. That stillness is existentialism. Film happens to be the finest machine ever built to deliver it.

I am nobody in cinema, six scripts registered and waiting, but I have spent twenty years reading these philosophers and watching directors smuggle their ideas past our defences. So here is a map for the beginner. Not a lecture. A way in.

What existentialism actually says

Strip away the jargon and the core claim is small and frightening. There is no instruction manual. No cosmic author wrote your purpose in advance. You are thrown into a world that arrived with no meaning attached, and you are free, terribly free, to decide what your one life amounts to. Jean-Paul Sartre put it in a line that still lands like a slap.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.Jean-Paul Sartre

Condemned. Not blessed. Freedom here is not a holiday, it is a weight you carry to the grave. Film studies keeps a whole shelf on how cinema hands you that weight, and if you want the academic version, the writeup on existentialism in film studies lays it out cleanly. But you do not need the theory to feel it. You need the right films.

There is a single phrase underneath all of this that clarifies more than any lecture: existence precedes essence. A knife has an essence before it exists, because someone designed it to cut before the metal was ever shaped. A person has no such blueprint. You exist first, thrown into a body and a family and a decade you did not choose, and only afterward, through what you actually do, does anything like an essence, a character, a self, get built. Nothing about you was decided in advance. That is either the most frightening sentence in modern philosophy or the most liberating one, and most people who sit with it long enough eventually land on both at once.

How a film delivers the idea without a speech

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is the textbook case, and it never opens a textbook. A knight plays chess with Death and demands, out loud, that God break the silence and give him a reason. God says nothing. The whole film is a man staring into that silence and choosing, in the end, one small act of kindness anyway. Bergman does not explain freedom to you. He straps you into the knight's dread for ninety minutes and lets you feel the size of a choice made without any guarantee.

Then there is After Life, the quiet Japanese film where the newly dead must pick one single memory to keep forever. That is the entire premise. And it turns you, the viewer, into a philosopher without warning, because you cannot watch it without silently sorting your own life for the one moment worth eternity. That is cinema doing what a paragraph cannot. It does not describe the search for meaning. It makes you run the search yourself, in your own chair, in the dark.

A book tells you life has no built-in meaning. A film makes you feel the empty page and hands you the pen.

An invented scene, to show the method rather than describe it

Let me build a small scene, invented for this piece, to show existentialism working at street level rather than in a philosophy hall. A man in his fifties runs a small hardware shop that his father built and that no longer makes any real money, undercut by a chain store two streets over. His son, visiting from the city, tells him plainly that the shop should close, that he is only keeping it open out of guilt to a dead man. The father says nothing for a long moment. Then he opens the till, counts out the day's meagre earnings, exactly enough to cover one employee's wage, and hands it to the old assistant who has worked there for thirty years. He says only, "Same time tomorrow." That is the whole scene.

Nobody mentions freedom. Nobody mentions meaning. And yet the entire existentialist claim is sitting inside that gesture. Nothing in the universe requires this shop to stay open. There is no cosmic ledger rewarding the father for his loyalty. He has been handed a life with no instructions, and in the total absence of a reason that would satisfy his son's logic, he simply chooses, again, to be the kind of man who shows up. That choice, undramatic and quiet, is existentialism doing its actual work, the work it was always meant to do before philosophers wrote it into books.

If I were staging this as an actual screenplay, I would resist every temptation to give the father a speech justifying himself to his son. The urge to explain is always strongest exactly where the scene needs silence most. The till closing, the assistant's small nod, the son's face as he realises his father heard every word and chose anyway, that is the entire scene. Anything more would be the film losing its nerve and doing the audience's thinking for them.

Four ideas and how a film can smuggle them in

A short shelf to start with

If you want to feel the tradition instead of reading about it, begin here. Watch for the shape underneath each one: a person facing a silent universe and having to answer for themselves.

• The Seventh Seal, for the dread of a God who will not answer.
• Ikiru, Kurosawa's story of a dying bureaucrat who finally decides what his days were for.
• After Life, for the weight of a single chosen memory.
• Wild Strawberries, for an old man auditing a life he can no longer edit.

Notice that none of them are cheerful, and all of them leave you strangely lighter. That is the paradox at the heart of the whole tradition. The philosophers who insisted the universe hands you nothing were, oddly, the ones who set you free to build something.

Why cinema, more than the novel, was built for this idea

I have written 21 books, so I say this having lived on both sides of the argument. A novel can describe a silent universe in a sentence and move on. A film cannot describe silence. It has to sit inside it, in real time, with an actor's face holding still on screen for four, five, six seconds while nothing is said and nothing resolves. That duration is not decoration, it is the entire argument, made physically available to your body in the dark in a way prose can only gesture toward. When the knight in The Seventh Seal waits for God to answer and nothing comes, we wait with him, second by actual second. A page can tell you he waited. A film makes you wait. The philosophy of existentialism is fundamentally about what it feels like to exist inside an unanswered silence, and only a medium built out of real, unskippable time can put you inside that feeling rather than merely inform you of it.

Why this belongs at your keyboard

Here is the part that matters if you write. Existentialism is not a genre you bolt onto a script. It is a lens for building a character who has to choose without a safety net. Every strong protagonist is, quietly, an existential figure: someone the world has stopped protecting, forced to act and own the result. You do not need a chessboard and Death. You need one person, one impossible choice, and the honesty to withhold the easy answer.

This is the same discipline I keep circling back to. A film that thinks does not announce its thinking, an argument I made in full over in how films think without telling you they are thinking. You stage the question inside a person and get out of the way, which is only possible if you understand that person from the inside, the skill I called the one thing that cannot be faked. And you deliver it through behaviour, never a monologue, which is just show, don't tell aimed at the largest question we have.

So do not try to put existentialism into your script like a spice. Find the choice that genuinely keeps you awake at 3 a.m., the one with no clean answer, and give it to a person you understand completely. Then let the universe stay silent, the way it actually is. If you have built it right, nobody will call your film philosophical. They will just find they cannot stop thinking about it, which is the same thing, arriving the honest way.

Existentialism and its cousin, the absurd

People often use existentialism and absurdism as if they were the same idea, and they are close relatives rather than twins. Existentialism, in the Sartre tradition, says the universe is silent and you are free, so build your own meaning inside that silence. Camus, who resisted being called an existentialist at all, pushed further into the gap itself, the collision between our hunger for meaning and a universe that will never supply it, calling that collision absurd. Where existentialism ends in a kind of responsibility, the absurd tradition often ends in something closer to defiant joy, choosing to live fully anyway, precisely because no answer is coming. I go deeper into that second half of the family in the absurd on screen, but it is worth knowing, as a beginner, that the two ideas share a house even if they keep different rooms.

Questions beginners ask about existentialism in film