Movies like The Man Who Sleeps (1974)
The best movies like The Man Who Sleeps (1974) are The Cube (1969), Wonderwall (1969) and The Dance of Reality (2013). If The Man Who Sleeps hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedPersona (1966)8.1/10 from 2,525 votes
- NewestThe Unknown (2026)Released 2026
- In FrenchWeekend (1967)Also in French
The Cube (1969)
An unnamed character is trapped in a cubical white room where others can enter and leave, but which he himself apparently cannot leave. A stool is brought in covered in strawberry jam, the furniture changes throughout the play. The main character is subjected to an increasingly puzzling and frustrating series of encounters, as a variety of people come through various hidden doors. But, as many remind him, he can only leave through his own door, so he must find it.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Wonderwall (1969)
The eccentric professor Collins lives completely secluded in his chaotic apartment. When the model Penny moves in next to him, he becomes fascinated by her. He drills holes in her walls and ceiling and peeps on her day and night. He loses himself in daydreams and delusions.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Dance of Reality (2013)
'Having broken away from my illusory self, I was desperately seeking a path and a meaning to life.' This phrase perfectly sums up Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical project: reconstituting the incredible adventure of his life. He was born in 1929 Tocopilla, a coastal town on edge of the Chilean desert, where he discovered the fundamentals of reality, as he underwent an unhappy and alienated childhood as part of an uprooted family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisWeekend (1967)
A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.
Why it matches: Fans watch both
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisInstitute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995)
Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a better room. No other students arrive and none leave for employment. Johannes is unhappy, imperious, and detached from the school's operation. Lisa is beautiful, at first tightly controlled, then on the verge of breakdown. There's a whiff of incest. Jakob is drawn to Lisa, and perhaps she to him. As winter sets in, she becomes catatonic. Things get worse; Johannes notes that all this has happened since Jakob came. Is there any cause and effect?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisEntr'acte (1924)
Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most dada film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agreements.
Why it matches: Fans watch both
Worth the HypeMovies like thisIdentikit (1974)
A mentally disturbed woman arrives in Rome to find a city fragmented by autocratic law, leftist violence, and her own increasingly unhinged mission to find the most dangerous liaison of all.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Holy Mountain (1973)
The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPrelude: Dog Star Man (1961)
A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCity of Pirates (1984)
A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Exterminating Angel (1962)
After a lavish dinner party, the guests find themselves unable to depart... and, over the next few days, all of their elaborate societal pretenses and façades deteriorate as they are reduced to living like animals.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisAbout Endlessness (2019)
A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments have the same significance as historical events. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisWerckmeister Harmonies (2001)
A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisPersona (1966)
A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisStreet of Crocodiles (1986)
A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.
Why it matches: Fans watch both
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisOn the Silver Globe (1989)
A small group of cosmic explorers, including a woman, leaves Earth to start a new civilization. They do not realize that within themselves they carry the end of their own dream. They die one by one, while their children revert to a primitive native culture, creating new myths and a new god.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Trial (1962)
Arrested for an unnamed crime, Josef K. is trapped in a surreal bureaucratic maze where justice is unknowable and guilt is assumed.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisHour of the Wolf (1968)
While vacationing on a remote German island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAlphaville (1965)
Lemmy Caution is on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of a malevolent computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s daughter Natasha, Lemmy must unravel the mysteries of the strictly logical Alpha 60 and teach Natasha the meaning of the word “love.”
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisSynecdoche, New York (2008)
A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisEraserhead (1977)
First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.
Why it matches: Fans watch both
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Milky Way (1969)
Two men, part tramp, part pilgrim, are on their way from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. On their way, they meet a vast assortment of characters—some truculent, some violent, and some bizarre; they experience many adventures—some mysterious, some erotic, some even supernatural.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAlice in the Cities (1974)
German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer’s block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same. The three become friends (almost out of necessity) and while the mother asks Winter to mind Alice temporarily, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice will be his responsibility for longer than he expected.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCéline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLong Live Death (1971)
At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father's arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father's arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what's going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad's natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother's nature and his father's fate. Will Fando survive the search?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisNouvelle Vague (1990)
Composed entirely of literary quotations from many different sources and from several historical periods, the loose narrative concerns a drifter found by a rich woman who soon falls in love with him. A drowning accident takes place and the drifter dies, but some time later he reappears in the woman’s life looking for a job. Or could it be the man’s twin brother?
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Still Life (1974)
A railway crossing guard and his wife live in a routine of total isolation and uneventfulness.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
The Devil, Probably (1977)
Charles drifts through politics, religion and psychoanalysis, rejecting them all. Once he realises the depth of his disgust with the moral and physical decline of the society he lives in, he decides that suicide is the only option...
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Unknown (2026)
David Zimmerman, almost 40, is a photographer but no one knows it. When friends drag him to a wild party, he spots a woman in the crowd and can’t take his eyes off her, he follows her… A few hours later, David wakes up: he’s in the body of the unknown woman.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like The Man Who Sleeps?
The closest matches to The Man Who Sleeps are The Cube (1969), Wonderwall (1969) and The Dance of Reality (2013). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after The Man Who Sleeps?
People who watched The Man Who Sleeps most often go on to The Cube (1969), Wonderwall (1969) and The Dance of Reality (2013).
What is the highest-rated movie like The Man Who Sleeps?
Persona (1966), rated 8.1/10 by 2,525 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like The Man Who Sleeps?
The Unknown (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there French movies like The Man Who Sleeps?
Yes: Weekend (1967), Entr'acte (1924) and City of Pirates (1984).
How are movies similar to The Man Who Sleeps chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside The Man Who Sleeps, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.