Movies like White Noise

Why it's similar — Sam Esmail's adaptation lands a year after Baumbach's and operates on the same DeLillo-adjacent register: a comfortable American family confronted with an unexplained large-scale event whose meaning the surrounding media is too compromised to clarify. Both films stage the disaster around a household rather than a city, and both refuse to commit to whether the threat is environmental, political or metaphysical.

Why it's similar — John Hillcoat's Cormac McCarthy adaptation pairs the post-disaster American family with the same low-grey palette that Baumbach's middle act borrows from. The Road is bleaker than White Noise wants to be, but the same image — a parent driving a station wagon through a country that has stopped recognising itself — is where both films are most clearly looking.

Why it's similar — An airborne-toxin thriller that picks up DeLillo's central image and runs it as straight genre. The middle act of White Noise — the evacuation, the checkpoint, the handheld exposure meter — is the entire premise of Contagion of Fear, and viewers who liked the cloud sequence will find the focused version here.

Why it's similar — Paul Schrader's Russell Banks adaptation locates the same anxious-male-protagonist register in small-town America and lets the central character disintegrate at the same slow pace Driver's Jack works through. Affliction is colder than White Noise's bright-palette comedy will admit, but the underlying portrait of a man whose performance of competence will not hold up overlaps directly.

Why it's similar — Rowan Woods's ensemble-trauma piece pairs the public-disaster premise with the same therapy-and-prescription middle act White Noise builds around Babette's Dylar arc. Both films are interested in how Americans cope with a catastrophe by chemical means, and both treat pharmacology as one of the era's stand-in religions.