15 Movies About the Suburbs That Are Surprisingly Dark, Funny, and True

1. American Beauty (1999)

• Director: Sam Mendes
• Writer: Alan Ball
• Cast: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari

This Best Picture winner is arguably the definitive "dark side of the suburbs" film. It's all about peeling back the layers. We follow the Burnham family, whose seemingly perfect life is a hollow shell full of angst and a life that needs to be lived.

Lester Burnham's mid-life crisis gets everyone's repressed and longing simmering emotions to bubble over as the whole neighborhood undergoes changes. It’s a satirical and tragic look at the emptiness of chasing material perfection.

2. Edward Scissorhands (1990)

• Director: Tim Burton
• Writer: Caroline Thompson (Screenplay), Tim Burton (Story)
• Cast: Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall

I love how this sort of messed-up Christmas movie was able to bring the holiday magic and skewer all of the American Suburbs at the same time. Tim Burton’s gothic fairytale uses its title character, a gentle soul with scissors for hands, as the ultimate outsider trying to fit in. He is dropped into a pastel-colored, cookie-cutter suburbia where his uniqueness is first celebrated as a novelty and then feared as a threat.

The movie is a metaphor for conformity and the suburbs' inability to accept anyone who doesn't fit the mold.

3. Blue Velvet (1986)

• Director: David Lynch
• Writer: David Lynch
• Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern

"It's a strange world, isn't it?" David Lynch’s masterpiece begins when a young man finds a severed ear in a perfectly green field in his idyllic hometown.

This gruesome discovery pulls him into a violent and depraved underworld operating just behind the closed doors of his community. It also pays him back royally for snooping around by subjecting him to things so depraved that he may never be the same person again.

Blue Velvet is the quintessential Lynchian exploration of the rot and decay hidden by the wholesome façade of small-town American life.

4. The Virgin Suicides (1999)

• Director: Sofia Coppola
• Writer: Sofia Coppola (Screenplay), Jeffrey Eugenides (Novel)
• Cast: Kirsten Dunst, James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Josh Hartnett

I actually just saw this for the first time a year ago, and the movie completely blew me away. It's a masterpiece that perfectly unlocks what it feels like to have suburban ennui.

Set in a 1970s Michigan suburb, Sofia Coppola's dreamy, melancholic debut tells the story of the five enigmatic Lisbon sisters. The movie is narrated by a group of neighborhood boys who were obsessed with them. The film explores suffocating suburban repression, adolescent angst, and the tragedy of lives trapped by parental control and societal expectations.

The hazy cinematography contrasts sharply with the dark story, creating a haunting portrait of insulated suburban life.

5. Revolutionary Road (2008)

• Director: Sam Mendes
• Writer: Justin Haythe (Screenplay), Richard Yates (Novel)
• Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates

You've probably never seen Mom and Dad fight like this...well, hopefully. This devastating film reunites the stars of Titanic -- Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet -- as Frank and April Wheeler, a seemingly golden couple living in 1950s Connecticut.

They are young, attractive, and have two kids, but they are drowning in the "hopeless emptiness" of their suburban existence and looking for more out of the world. The film is a brutal dissection of the post-war American dream. Things were supposed to be better, but they somehow aren't. It shows how the pressure to conform and "settle down" can utterly destroy the human spirit.

6. The Ice Storm (1997)

• Director: Ang Lee
• Writer: James Schamus (Screenplay), Rick Moody (Novel)
• Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood

Man, this is one of those movies that just knocks your socks off when you watch. It's set over a cold Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, and examines two affluent suburban families as they navigate the confusing fallout of the sexual revolution.

You have two key groups. The adults engage in in joyless affairs (famously culminating in a "key party") and then their children, who are all experimenting with sex and drugs, trying to find themselves.

The movie perfectly captures a specific era of moral and emotional disillusionment. The titular ice storm serves as a perfect metaphor for the frozen, fragile relationships between the characters.

7. Get Out (2017)

• Director: Jordan Peele
• Writer: Jordan Peele
• Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Lil Rel Howery

Absolutely one of the best movies ever made and just a gripping hororr that completely understands how alienating the suburbs can be.

Jordan Peele’s groundbreaking debut re-contextualized the "sinister suburb" for the 21st century. What starts as a "meet the parents" weekend in an affluent, liberal suburb quickly descends into a living nightmare.

The movie brilliantly uses the horror genre to critique the insidious, hidden racism that thrives in seemingly progressive, "colorblind" white communities. They all love Obama, but don't want him living next door.

8. Pleasantville (1998)

• Director: Gary Ross
• Writer: Gary Ross
• Cast: Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy

I love anything high concept that actually grounds itself in something bigger. This clever fantasy transports two 1990s teenagers into the black-and-white world of a 1950s suburban sitcom.

When they begin to introduce real-world ideas like passion, art, and complex ideas, the town's citizens and environment literally begin to turn to color.

Pleasantville is a smart, funny, and surprisingly profound satire about the dangers of nostalgia, conformity, and the fear of change that defines so much of the American ideal.

9. The Stepford Wives (1975)

• Director: Bryan Forbes
• Writer: William Goldman (Screenplay), Ira Levin (Novel)
• Cast: Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson, Nanette Newman

This is the original satirical thriller that made "Stepford" a household term. When Joanna Eberhart moves with her family to the idyllic town of Stepford, Connecticut, she finds that all the women are beautiful, demure, and completely subservient to their husbands.

The film is a chilling and effective feminist critique of patriarchal society, where the male desire for domestic perfection is taken to a horrifying, robotic extreme.

10. Ordinary People (1980)

• Director: Robert Redford
• Writer: Alvin Sargent (Screenplay), Judith Guest (Novel)
• Cast: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton

This Academy Award winner for Best Picture proves that the horrors of the suburbs aren't always satirical or supernatural. Sometimes, they're devastatingly real and sad.

The film follows the Jarrett family, who are trying to piece their lives back together after the death of their eldest son. And none of them is taking it well.

It is a heart-wrenching portrait of a family's inability to communicate with one another and their need to be seen as "okay" by the rest of the world.

11. The Truman Show (1998)

• Director: Peter Weir
• Writer: Andrew Niccol
• Cast: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris, Noah Emmerich

I think this is a movie that feels like magic. We're in a perfect suburb where everything is just a little off.

Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man who doesn't know his entire life has been a 24/7 television show mocked after those classic '50s sitcoms. His pristine, safe, and friendly island town of Seahaven is a giant set, and all his relationships are organized and carefully planned.

The film is a brilliant satire on media, reality TV, and the comforting, manufactured safety of a suburban life where nothing bad ever really happens.

12. Heathers (1989)

• Director: Michael Lehmann
• Writer: Daniel Waters
• Cast: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker

I feel like everyone talks about this movie, but not enough people have really seen it. This pitch-black comedy takes the high school hierarchy of a wealthy Ohio suburb and blows it up—literally.

When Veronica teams up with the misanthropic new kid, J.D., the satirical takedowns of popular cliques, teen suicide, and adult indifference escalate into actual murder. It’s a hilarious critique of the social pressures festering in a "good" school district.

13. Donnie Darko (2001)

• Director: Richard Kelly
• Writer: Richard Kelly
• Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, Maggie Gyllenhaal

I feel like this was the first indie movie that really got my attention. It is a cult classic that blends '80s suburban nostalgia with science fiction and psychological horror to give us a dissection of what America looked like and how things have changed.

Set in 1988, the film follows a troubled teenager who is visited by a man in a nightmarish rabbit costume named Frank, who tells him the world will end. The film uses its surreal premise to explore the hypocrisy of its suburban setting, from a secretly corrupt self-help guru (a perfect Patrick Swayze) to the judgmental school system that just can't seem to get anything right.

14. The 'Burbs (1989)

• Director: Joe Dante
• Writer: Dana Olsen
• Cast: Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman

One of my Letterboxd favorites, I think this movie is highly underrated. This cult classic, as requested, is a brilliant dark comedy about suburban paranoia.

Tom Hanks plays a man trying to enjoy a "staycation" who becomes utterly convinced that his new, bizarre neighbors are devil-worshipping murderers.

We get to be the nosy, curtain-twitching people who have to know just enough about our neighbors to be dangerously suspicious of them. And then deal with those consequences.

15. Poltergeist (1982)

• Director: Tobe Hooper
• Writers: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
• Cast: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O'Rourke

"They're he-e-e-re." This '80s horror classic turns the suburban dream home into a haunted house. We learned that the darkness in the suburbs is what America was built on and has to be reconciled.

The Freeling family's idyllic life in their new planned community is shattered when malevolent spirits invade their home. The film's most potent critique is its reveal: the greedy developers built the suburb on top of an old cemetery, literally burying the past under a foundation of pristine family homes.

Summing It All Up 

These were my picks for the best movies about the suburbs, but I am sure there's a bunch I missed.

What are your favorites?