Movies like Optic Nerve (1985)
The best movies like Optic Nerve (1985) are For Sama (2019), Wasp (2003) and Butterflies Are Free (1972). If Optic Nerve hooked you, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedFor Sama (2019)8.2/10 from 323 votes
- NewestMadame Favre's (2026)Released 2026
For Sama (2019)
A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisWasp (2003)
Zoë is a single mother who lives with her four children in Dartford. She is poor and can't afford to buy food. One day her old flame drives by and asks her to go on a date with him. Scared that he doesn't want to go out with her, she lies and tells him that she is just babysitting the kids. This will be her first date in years.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisButterflies Are Free (1972)
Striving to be independent, the blind but determined Don Baker moves away from his overprotective mother. After settling into his new San Francisco digs, Don meets kooky neighbor Jill Tanner. Don's quick wit and good looks disarm the free-spirited Jill, and before long they're more than just friends. Will Mrs. Baker's incessant meddling destroy Don and Jill's budding relationship?
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMammal (2016)
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisZ Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)
A documentary on the Z Channel, one of the first pay cable stations in the US, and its programming chief, Jerry Harvey. Debuting in 1974, the LA-based channel's eclectic slate of movies became a prime example of the untapped power of cable television.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLullaby (2014)
Estranged from his family, Jonathan (Hedlund) discovers his father has decided to take himself off life support in forty-eight hours’ time. During this intensely condensed period, a lifetime of drama plays out. Robert (Jenkins) fights a zero sum game to reclaim all that his illness stole from his family. A debate rages on patients’ rights and what it truly means to be free. Jonathan reconciles with his father, reconnects with his mother (Archer), sister (Brown-Findlay), and his love (Adams) and reclaims his voice through two unlikely catalysts – a young, wise-beyond-her-years patient (Barden) and a no-nonsense nurse (Hudson). Through this intensely life affirming prism, an unexpected and powerful journey of love, laughter, and forgiveness unfolds.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisRoom 237 (2012)
A subjective documentary that explores various theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisNight Will Fall (2014)
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAround the Bend (2004)
A tale of four generations of men, all of whom have had their offspring at a young age: a great-grandfather, a grandfather, a father in his twenties and a son who is about 7 years old. When the oldest member passes away, the trio heads out on the road together in the Southwest to search out an old family secret that connects to their past.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
SnoozefestMovies like thisBand Aid (2017)
A couple who can't stop fighting embark on a last-ditch effort to save their marriage: turning their fights into songs and starting a band.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMy First Summer (2020)
Isolated on a remote property, 16-year-old Claudia finds her world transformed when a spirited girl named Grace wanders into her garden.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisCensor (2021)
A screener at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), who has earned an unsavory reputation for being the strictest censor of violent films, begins to spiral out of control after viewing a low-budget horror with similarities to the disappearance of her sister.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
SnoozefestMovies like thisPariah (2011)
A Brooklyn teenager juggles conflicting identities and risks friendship, heartbreak, and family in a desperate search for sexual expression.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDon't Make Me Go (2022)
A terminally ill man and his teenage daughter embark on a road trip from California to New Orleans for his 20th college reunion. While there, he secretly hopes she can reunite with the mother who left them long ago.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Sweet East (2023)
A picaresque journey through contemporary America, undertaken by a young woman granted access to the strange sects and cults that proliferate in this country by a series of gatekeepers eager to win her over.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisRobin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018)
A funny, intimate and heartbreaking portrait of one of the world’s most beloved and inventive comedians, Robin Williams, told largely through his own words. Celebrates what he brought to comedy and to the culture at large, from the wild days of late-1970s L.A. to his death in 2014.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Silent Twins (2022)
June and Jennifer Gibbons are twins from the only Black family in a small town in Wales in the 1970s and '80s. Feeling isolated from the community, the pair turn inward and reject communication with everyone but each other, retreating into their own fantasy world of inspiration and adolescent desires. After a spree of vandalism, the girls are sentenced to Broadmoor, an infamous psychiatric hospital, where they face the choice to separate and survive or die together.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisA Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisRicky Gervais: Mortality (2025)
Ricky Gervais tackles life, death and the state of the world in a brutally honest special that spares no topic, even his own mortality.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Road Within (2014)
A young man with Tourette's Syndrome embarks on a road trip with his recently-deceased mother's ashes.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTaryn Barker: Demon Hunter (2016)
A young girl tormented by the tragedies of her past is brought in for questioning by the police over the death of a man, who she claims to be a demon. Detective Beckett realizes this is the same girl he made a broken promise to seven years ago that he'd find the monster that raped and murdered her 12 year old sister.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
This Cacophony Runs Over Me (2017)
This cacophony runs over me, over everything I see, everything I want to see: it's me.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Grease 2 (1982)
It's 1961, two years after the original Grease gang graduated, and there's a new crop of seniors and new members of the coolest cliques on campus, the Pink Ladies and T-Birds. Michael Carrington is the new kid in school - but he's been branded a brainiac. Can he fix up an old motorcycle, don a leather jacket, avoid a rumble with the leader of the T-Birds, and win the heart of Pink Lady Stephanie?
Why it matches: Similar story and style
SnoozefestMovies like thisMadame Favre's (2026)
In a nursing home, a young man visits his grandmother. As she constantly repeats that she wants to go home, his grandson visits her now empty apartment, seeking to capture memories of a fading past.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Unforgettable (2024)
On Christmas Eve, a burglar is tasked with stealing a necklace from an old lady. Nothing is going to go as planned…
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Khush (1991)
Khush means ecstatic pleasure in Urdu. For South Asian lesbians and gay men in Britain, North America, and India, the term captures the blissful intricacies of being queer and of color. Inspiring testimonies bridge geographical differences to locate shared experiences of isolation and exoticization but also the unremitting joys and solidarity of being khush.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
King of the Cannibal Islands (1908)
Believed to be the first film to feature cannibals.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Spread (2016)
Home-video footage of infants playing transforms into an experimental display of rotoscope animation.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
1+1=3 (1979)
An unmarried actress in Munich becomes pregnant but decides against marrying the child's father, and eventually moves in with a more agreeable man she meets on a winter sports holiday.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
2071 - Horoscopes and Psychotropics (2021)
It is a feature film in development and research. It tells the story of a pharmacopornographic treatment imposed on a woman after an attempted suicide. But it is the year 2071 that an alternative comes to her.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Optic Nerve?
The closest matches to Optic Nerve are For Sama (2019), Wasp (2003) and Butterflies Are Free (1972). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Optic Nerve?
Start with For Sama (2019), the closest match to Optic Nerve.
What is the highest-rated movie like Optic Nerve?
For Sama (2019), rated 8.2/10 by 323 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Optic Nerve?
Madame Favre's (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there English movies like Optic Nerve?
Yes: For Sama (2019), Wasp (2003) and Butterflies Are Free (1972).
How are movies similar to Optic Nerve chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Optic Nerve, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.