Movies like Upstream
The best movies like Upstream (2017) are Eleanor the Great (2025), Chaos (2001) and Heaven Will Wait (2016). If Upstream hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedThe Beasts (2022)7.5/10 from 999 votes
- NewestEleanor the Great (2025)Released 2025
- In FrenchChaos (2001)Also in French
Eleanor the Great (2025)
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisChaos (2001)
A bourgeois couple, modern yet conventional. One night by accident, a young prostitute barges into their lives. Hounded down, beaten up, threatened, she will continue to struggle, with the help of a well off lady, first for her survival-her resurrection-then for her dignity and freedom. Stormy encounters for everyone involved.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisHeaven Will Wait (2016)
Mélanie, 16 years old, lives with her mother. She likes going to school, her friends, playing the cello, and she wants to change the world. But when she meets a boy on the Internet and falls in love with him, her world changes as she is gradually recruited by Daesh. Sonia is 17 years old, and she almost did something irrevocable to “guarantee” her family a place in paradise. These teenage girls might be called Anaïs, Manon or Leila, and one day they all might go some way down the recruitment process. But can they ever come back from it?
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like this24 Days (2014)
When Ilan Halimi is kidnapped for ransom because Jewish and supposedly rich, his family and the police start a race against time to save him from the tortures of the "gang of barbarians".
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisGigi & Nate (2022)
A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMy Dinner with Hervé (2018)
An unlikely friendship evolves over one wild night in LA between a struggling journalist and actor Hervé Villechaize, the world's most famous gun-toting dwarf, resulting in life-changing consequences for both.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisYoung Mothers (2025)
Housed in a shelter for young mothers, Jessica, Perla, Julia, Ariane, and Naïma, all of whom have grown up in difficult circumstances, struggle to obtain a better life for themselves and their children.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Girl in the Book (2015)
The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisThe Beasts (2022)
Antoine and Olga, a French couple, have been living in a small village in Galicia for a long time. They practice eco-responsible agriculture and restore abandoned houses to facilitate repopulation. Everything should be idyllic except for their opposition to a wind turbine project that creates a serious conflict with their neighbors. The tension will rise to the point of irreparability.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisOut of Control (2025)
Julien and Marie have enjoyed 15 years of seemingly stable marriage until Anaëlle, Julien’s childhood flame, returns. Her sudden presence awakens old insecurities in Marie, who begins to doubt Julien’s devotion and question her self-worth. Amid this emotional storm, Marie is drawn to Thomas, a charismatic stranger who offers her the validation she craves.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisLight of My Life (2019)
Years after a pandemic wipes out most of the female population, a father struggles to shield his daughter from a dangerous and predatory world.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisOut of Season (2024)
Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small seaside resort in Western France. He is a famous actor, about to turn fifty. She is a piano teacher in her forties. They were in love fifteen years ago, then separated. Time has passed. They each went their ways and slowly healed. When Mathieu goes try to overcome his melancholia in a thermal spa, he stumbles upon Alice.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMy Little Princess (2011)
Young Violetta and her mother Hannah are a peculiar couple. Ten-year-old Violetta lives a quiet life with her grandmother, while her mother Hannah is an unpredictable photographer who lives off of the generosity of others. When Hannah forces her daughter to pose as a model, Violetta finds her life with her loving grandmother turned upside down.The resulting pictures quickly become a sensation for the trendy 70's Paris art scene, and Violetta finds herself caught in between her new stature as an art muse and her dull childhood.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Minister (2011)
Transport Minister Bertrand Saint-Jean is awoken in the middle of the night by his head of staff. A bus has gone off the road into a gully. He has no choice but to go to the scene of the accident. Thus begins the odyssey of a politician in a world that is increasingly more complex and hostile.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Passengers of the Night (2022)
On election night in 1981, celebrations spill out onto the street and there is an air of hope and change throughout Paris. But for Elisabeth, her marriage is coming to an end and she will now have to support herself and her two teenage children. She finds work at a late-night radio show and encounters a troubled teenager named Talulah whom she invites into her home.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMoka (2016)
Diane Kramer is led by one obsession: to find the driver of the mocha color Mercedes which hit her son and devastated her life. With a few belongings, some money and a gun, she goes to Evian, where she's learned the driver lives.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisJonathan (2018)
Jonathan is a young man with a strange condition that only his brother understands. But when he begins to yearn for a different life, their unique bond becomes increasingly tested.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisWhat Maisie Knew (2013)
In New York City, six-year-old Maisie is caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle between her self-absorbed parents—an aging rock singer mother and a distracted art dealer father. As both quickly marry new partners to strengthen their legal standing, Maisie is shuttled back and forth in an endless game of emotional point-scoring. Yet amid the chaos and upheaval, Maisie begins to find true comfort and affection in her new step-parents.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisFive Minutes of Heaven (2009)
The story of former Ulster Volunteer Force member Alistair Little. Twenty-five years after Little killed Joe Griffin's brother, the media arrange an auspicious meeting between the two.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Sound of Silence (2019)
A successful "house tuner" in New York City, who calibrates the sound in people's homes in order to adjust their moods, meets a client with a problem he can't solve.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
SnoozefestMovies like thisDoubts (1964)
A fickle and unfaithful husband, Antonis, tries to drive his rich wife crazy so that he can get his hands on her fortune, with the chauffeur and his lover as accomplices. In order to succeed, he fakes his own death, but fate, as usual, plays its own game. A game in which an old friend of his wife is also involved, a reporter on the police beat, Bekas, who is trying to solve a mystery in which strange phenomena come one right after the other, and doubts never seem to end.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
The Rebel of L. (2006)
On the night of graduation prom the credit to the English Language School, Loris tries to escape to the West, but he is betrayed and captured. Charged with political motivation, Loris is sentenced. The year is 1986. The slogan written in red letters onto the wall in the prison is: If you don't know - we will teach you, if you can't - we will show you how, if you don't want to - we will force you. It is put into practice. Torture, cynicism and physical violence turn the talented young man into an impassive and coldblooded observer. The Berlin wall is falling. Loris is granted an amnesty. Already free, he is alienated and indifferent to the world. In his desperate escape from reality Loris revenges for his ruined life and takes the road to his own destruction. But he meets love. Loris tries to find salvation in yet another flight...
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Flower of the North (1921)
Two men, Philip Whittemore (Henry B. Walthall) and Thorpe (Harry Northrup) both go to the Northwest to gain the right-of-way for their railroad company from D'Arcambal (Emmett King). Whittemore arrives first and D'Arcambal refuses to meet with him until he saves his daughter, Jeanne (Pauline Starke) from going over the rapids. Then Thorpe arrives and tries to use force by kidnapping Jeanne and insisting that he is her father.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
The Way They Were (1987)
The Way They Were is a Spanish Drama starring Antonio Banderas
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Little Love Story (1981)
A little love story can actually be huge even if you are only twelve years old...
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
El acto (1989)
This is a Spanish Drama starring Antonio Banderas
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
The White Dove (1989)
Rocío, is in love with Mario, a free rider with a lot of face that, to top it all, is partner of the business of her father, Domingo with whom she maintains incestuous relations. When Domingo passes away, both Mario and Rocío's mother have to put to the front of the business, finishing with the inheritance that could receive Rocío. In the midst of her frustration, a young business worker, secretly in love with Rocío, will try to have the legacy of her father end up in the hands of his rightful heiress.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
The Next Door (2016)
Two Mormon missionaries become concerned when someone they teach goes missing. As they search for the answers, they find themselves plunged into a world of danger and deceit.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Lisbon-Province (2010)
A nurse takes care of a patient in her house. Maria do Céu has been a nurse for more than forty years, working at an old Hospital in Lisbon. She was sixteen, when she arrived to Lisbon, coming from a small village in Alentejo. At the Hospital, she reads the file of an old patient who was also her friend. The file is then closed. Maria do Céu returns to her village, where she sings at the people’s house choir.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Shamara (1994)
Industrial Soviet town in the 1970s is suffering from a cholera epidemic. Zina Shamarina, nicknamed Shamara, is a rebel-spirited woman who lives in a factory dormitory and is desperately in love with Ustin, the man who was one of the bunch that raped her years ago and then married her only to avoid prosecution. When Ustin commences an affair with the new girl in town, Shamara is challenged to regain herself and her place in this community.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both drama
Like Upstream and something else?
Blend two favourites and we’ll find the films in between.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Upstream?
The closest matches to Upstream are Eleanor the Great (2025), Chaos (2001) and Heaven Will Wait (2016). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Upstream?
Start with Eleanor the Great (2025), the closest match to Upstream.
What is the highest-rated movie like Upstream?
The Beasts (2022), rated 7.5/10 by 999 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Upstream?
Eleanor the Great (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there French movies like Upstream?
Yes: Chaos (2001), Heaven Will Wait (2016) and 24 Days (2014).
How are movies similar to Upstream chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Upstream, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.