Five Netflix movies that feel like a midweek hug
Some weeks just drag, don’t they? You start with good intentions, like a to-do list, some optimism, a Netflix watchlist and a smoothie maybe, and by Wednesday it’s all spiralling.
When the days are too long and your brain’s too full from doomscrolling as a distraction, you need a film that doesn’t try to overwhelm you with plot or noise that lets you breathe for a bit.
Netflix is full of loud titles and big names, but under their glam lie small, warm gems that we miss unintentionally. These films are tender and a bit imperfect, and that’s what makes them comforting, as they meet you exactly where you are but still leave you lighter by the end.
So if your midweek energy’s running on fumes and you just want a film that’ll feel like a friend sitting next to you, these five are exactly that.
Five Netflix movies for a midweek hug:
Carrie Pilby (Susan Johnson, 2016)
Carrie is the definition of emotionally unavailable in the most relatable way: she is too smart for her own good, hates small talk, and would rather critique people than connect with them. It’s exactly how you feel after a Tuesday, with all the positivity gone and you just trying to get past the remainder to the weekend goalpost, but underneath the sarcasm is someone who desperately wants to feel something real but just doesn’t know how.
The film is about Carrie’s messy attempt to figure it out sans huge transformations and magical romances for a slow, funny, honest resolution. Watching Carrie stumble through awkward dates and unexpected friendships feels like watching yourself try to be vulnerable after years of pretending you don’t care, making it the perfect comfort movie for overthinkers.
The Meyerowitz Stories (Noah Baumbach, 2017)
This one’s like that awkward birthday dinner with the family you can’t skip, except it’s funnier and weirdly healing. It follows three siblings who’ve grown up in the orbit of their loud, self-centred father, with everyone carrying years of resentment and love in equal measure, and Baumbach somehow makes all that mess feel tender. There are no shouting matches or dramatic monologues. Instead, you get just small, brutally honest moments that sting with realness and then make you laugh.
Every character is truly human in being slightly unbearable, with their passive-aggressive sighs, the unspoken apologies, and the strange affection that keeps families glued together even when they shouldn’t be. It’s a movie about disappointment that somehow ends up feeling like acceptance.
To the Bone (Marti Noxon, 2017)
This one’s heavier, but it doesn’t rush to crush you. In To the Bone we follow a young woman battling an eating disorder, but the film doesn’t treat her like a cautionary tale. It’s blunt, sometimes painfully so, but also darkly humorous, where you get to see the exhaustion of recovery, not as some dramatic breakthrough, but as a daily, uncertain fight to keep going.
It’s full of small moments that hit hard, like someone making a bad joke to avoid crying and someone else pretending to be fine when they’re anything but. Lily Collins is raw and sharp, and Marti Noxon never turns her pain into spectacle, which leaves the story sitting beside you long after it ends.
The Lost Husband (Vicky Wight, 2020)
There’s something so peaceful about this tale of a woman whose life falls apart, and instead of trying to rebuild it the way it was, she walks away from it all. She ends up on a goat farm, of all places, where silence and slow mornings become her new normal. Nothing major happens, and that’s exactly what makes it beautiful.
The core of the film picks at stillness, finding comfort in the kind of quiet that people running the rat race in metropolises forget exists. You watch little things like shared meals and fences getting fixed, while also witnessing hearts being mended without big declarations, in grounded and sunlit frames. By the end, you feel like you’ve been there too, finally okay with doing nothing.
The Beautiful Game (Thea Sharrock, 2024)
The most recent and the quietly hopeful of them all, on the surface, The Beautiful Game is about football. But once you look closely, it’s about people trying to find belonging when the world has already written them off. It’s full of heart and deep humility in the way it shows resilience without highlighting the cliches of cinema.
What makes the story special is its sincerity in representing the challenges faced by homelessness and a government eager to shake them down to avoid looking within their systemic chaos. The teams take their burdens and turn them into achievements, and amidst a constant flight risk in the form of Vinny, the British team learn to build a group based on trust. There’s no forced inspiration here, just small moments that add up and leave you teary but smiling because of the way people can still be good despite the roughhousing.