The 15 Best Movies That Take Place In One Location

When we go to the movies these days, we often expect maximalism. After all, superheroes have ruled the box office since the late 2000s, training audiences to expect massive budgets, big-name actors, bright colors, and flashy locations. We seem to want everything to be about the end of the world, or at least we want our blockbuster heroes to be globetrotters — see, for example, the last few “Mission: Impossible” and “Fast and the Furious” films, which have raced around the world from Rome to Rio and the Arctic to South Africa and back again.

That’s why it can seem like such a relief when a movie is happy to narrow its scope. Single-location films can be excellent counter-programming to movies that feel like they’re doing too much, letting us really relax into a story rather than always remaining on edge to see where we’re headed next. Plus, the limitations of a single-location film force moviemakers to get creative in order to emphasize other elements of the cinematic art form, often turning out to be fascinating vehicles for powerhouse performances, thrilling editing techniques, or virtuosic camera movement. The movies on this list are all stellar examples of the single-location movie, even if, sure, some of them cheat a little by having a few shots set elsewhere.

“12 Angry Men” is one of two films by Sidney Lumet on this list. This one is about the twelve jurors who hear a murder case, and aside from a few quick scenes in the main courtroom itself, the vast majority of the movie takes place in a deliberation room. It’s one of the most thrillingly-tense films ever made, and that’s purely a result of the strength of the script and performances.

When a film’s changing location isn’t one of its main draws, we’re often dependent on the changing faces of the actors to give the image some variety. Here we have twelve brilliant performances from stars like Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, Jack Klugman, and Ed Begley; while we’re listening to the jurors debate the case, we’re also watching closely for changes in their expression, examining them for any hint that they might be changing their minds. This was all carefully-composed; Lumet even used different eye levels to create tension in “12 Angry Men.” This is a movie about the power of words and reason, and it all plays out on the faces of these twelve angry men.

Okay, yes, “Assault on Precinct 13” has a famous sequence that don’t take place at the titular location; it opens on one of the most shocking acts of cinematic violence of all time, and that happens across town. Still, once the action heats up and a gang descends on a group of cops, most of “Assault on Precinct 13” is set at the police building that gives the movie its name.

This is a great example of a filmmaker using limited locations to increase the claustrophobic feeling of the story they’re telling. In locking the action down to this one building, John Carpenter makes the audience as desperate for escape as the cops under attack are. We feel the place closing in on us, and the camera shows us that there are only a few places to hide, only a few vantage points from which to see the menace advancing on us from the dark. Carpenter further slices the frame down into parts, with part of the action even taking place in the jail cells within the building, walling the characters off from one another. It’s an exercise in applying grueling pressure to a scenario, executed perfectly.

Sometimes, limited-location storytelling is a result of budget considerations. That’s part of what went into the development of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brilliant “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.” The German filmmaker was known for his extreme productivity, often directing multiple features every year; in fact, he’d released more than 40 films by the time he died at the age of 37. That meant budgets had to be kept relatively small, and one of the ways he did that was by limiting his locations.33

“The Bitter Teats of Petra von Kant” takes place entirely in the apartment of a designer by that name (Margit Carstensen). It’s not just any apartment, though; it’s one of the most stylish, beautifully-decorated apartments you’ve ever seen, complete with gorgeous frescoes and furniture in eye-popping colors. As Petra lounges around feeling sorry for herself, getting into romantic entanglements and arguing with the people who pass through her rooms, there’s always something worth swooning over. 

It’s easy to feel trapped in high school. By that point in your life, you’re well aware of the world outside your hometown, but you’re not allowed to leave and explore quite yet. Add in a weekend detention, and you’ve got the perfect mechanism for exploring that sense of teenage stagnation, that desperation to break free even as you’re kept in place.

This is the recipe for “The Breakfast Club,” a John Hughes movie set almost entirely in a library during a Saturday detention. Sure, the kids break out and run around the hallways for a bit, and perhaps “The Breakfast Club’s” most famous scene — which was improvised! — takes place on the football field at the end, but for the most part we’re just watching a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal get to know one another as they try to suffer through a day at their desks. They talk, entertain one another, break down, cry, laugh, and maybe, just maybe, learn something about themselves, and the banter is so compelling that we hardly notice we’ve been locked in this room with them.

Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” which is inspired by a true story, opens with a montage of daily life in Brooklyn set to Elton John’s “Amoreena.” There are kids playing basketball, construction workers on the job, people sunning themselves by the sea, businessmen walking in crowds … and then as the credits end, Sonny (Al Pacino) and friends walk into a bank. For the rest of the film, we’ll be stuck on this otherwise-nondescript city block, watching as a bank robbery goes horribly, helplessly sideways. Before Sonny knows what’s happening, there’s a massive crowd of both police and onlookers posted up outside, and as the story grips the city, Sonny finds himself a folk hero of sorts, even as he tries to find a way out of his impossible predicament.

Lumet’s camera is constantly on the move, keeping the image interesting even when we’re trapped in the lobby like the hostages are. There are big concrete pillars in the bank, and we’re constantly moving around them, trying to maintain our eyelines, always on edge for something else to go wrong. And: boy, does it.

In “Frozen” — the thriller from 2010, not the other one — three friends head up a mountain for a night of skiing. As they’re riding the chairlift for one final run, however, the lights go off and the lift powers down. The lodge employees have all gone home for the week, and these friends are left sitting there, alone, dangling two stories above the hard, icy ground. The mountain won’t be open again until Friday, and there’s a storm rolling in. For the rest of the movie, we’re stuck on that chairlift with them.

There were a number of these single-location thrillers in the early 2010s. “Buried” saw Ryan Reynolds spend the movie in a box underground; “12 Feet Deep: Trapped Sisters” trapped some sisters in a pool; and in “ATM,” Josh Peck and friends are pinned down at an ATM by a menacing man with a gun. “Frozen” is the best of that bunch, however, because none of those movies have a scene as grotesquely compelling as the one in “Frozen” involving wolves. If you know, you know; if you don’t, have fun finding out!

Karyn Kusama’s unsettling thriller “The Invitation” is about a man named Will (Logan Marshall-Green) who accepts an invitation to a peculiar dinner party. It’s being held at the home of his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard), and unbeknownst to Will, Eden’s been sucked into a cult. This isn’t just an invitation to dinner; it’s an invitation to be part of something bigger than Will can imagine. Over the course of the evening — all set in this one gorgeous house in the Hollywood Hills — secrets come to light, old scores are settled, and the story eventually opens up into something big and wild.

In fact, it’s that final moment that justifies the entire exercise of setting the whole movie in this one house. The impact of the movie’s final shot, which we won’t spoil here, simply wouldn’t be possible without initially keeping the scope of the movie as limited as possible.

Okay, technically “Locke” takes place across many locations — after all, it plays out over a real-time car trip as a man drives back to London. Still, the camera is confined to this one car; the passing locations are visible mostly as glittering light passing over the windshield, almost making it seem like Locke (Tom Hardy) is driving through a world of sparkling luminescence.

“Locke” is the ultimate distillation of the single-location thriller that depends largely on an actor’s performance; it’s an 85-minute car ride with just Hardy and his phone. He’s the only on-screen character for the vast majority of the film’s runtime, and we have nothing to watch but the expressions that cross his face as he conducts a series of tense phone calls. Hardy is extraordinary, a captivating actor whose frame-filling closeups are occasionally as electrifying as any action sequence. Even though not much “happens” by traditional measures, we end the film feeling as though we’ve taken quite the journey with him.

“Mass” doesn’t just give us one stellar performance to carry us through the fact that we’re spending most of the movie in one nondescript room. Instead, there are four powerhouses here, each actor given an extraordinary moment to shine … and by that, of course, we mean that they each get a moment to break your heart.

Fran Kranz’s film is about two sets of parents who come together in a church basement to have a conversation. As it unspools, we realize that they’re coming together in the aftermath of a school shooting. Both sets of parents have lost a son; while one family’s son was a victim, the other’s was the killer.

Reed Birney, Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs, and Martha Plimpton are all, simply put, shattering. We feel their claustrophobia in this nearly-blank room — this conversation is hard, and there’s not really an escape — but we also feel the soul-shaking catharsis of it all. This confrontation is something they’ve each been dreading for a long time, and even though it’s unspeakably difficult, God, is it good to get it all out in the open. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

“The Mist” is Frank Darabont’s third Stephen King adaptation. Like “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” both of which were set in prison, “The Mist” is about characters trapped at one location, longing for an escape, even though their world has been reduced to just the four walls of this one location. In “Shawshank” and “The Green Mile,” that world-winnowing was a result of the punishment placed on those characters by society; in “The Mist,” it’s something more elemental, unknowable, and frightening.

Thomas Jane plays David, a father who takes his young son to the grocery store on the morning after a terrifying thunderstorm. Before they know what’s happening, a mysterious mist has closed in on them from all sides, forcing David and a number of others to take shelter. “There’s something in the mist!” someone warns, just before the characters get a glimpse of something horrific moving through the shadows.

There are a number of great performances in this film, including the late, great Andre Braugher as a neighbor named Brent. As the little group of refugees form a society all their own, however, the most terrifying threat might not be what’s lurking in the mist — it’s Marcia Gay Harden’s Mrs. Carmody, a religious fanatic convinced that the end of the world is upon them. For more, check out /Film’s oral history of Darabont’s gut-wrenching film.

On occasion, Alfred Hitchcock viewed his various filmmaking exploits as “experiments.” He certainly spoke that way about “Rope” – more on that below — but he seemed to enjoy the experience of setting a challenge for himself and then designing a film around that challenge. Sometimes, that meant keeping his movies to one single location, as in “Lifeboat,” a 1944 film set almost entirely on a lifeboat adrift at sea.

His third such film was “Rear Window,” a 1954 film starring James Stewart as a photojournalist named Jeff who’s recuperating from a leg injury. Through the lens of his camera, Jeff watches the people in the building across the courtyard, his telephoto lens letting us peer through their windows even though Hitchcock’s camera stays in Jeff’s apartment. One night, while watching his neighbor, Jeff believes he may have witnessed a murder. Who should he tell? Will he be believed? Or is his voyeurism a crime in and of itself? And … as viewers … aren’t we voyeurs, too?

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” doesn’t just stick to one location. It also plays out in real time, shot in what’s meant to look like one single take. We’re stuck in the apartment belonging to Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall), trapped here with them as they host a dinner party moments after murdering someone and stuffing him in a trunk. In fact, in a twisted bit of wit, Brandon decides that dinner itself will be served atop the trunk.

To keep the action in this one location and shoot it in this way, Hitchcock had to devise a set full of movable walls and furniture. The camera glides around the room, drawing our attention to someone’s reaction, someone’s peculiar stare, someone’s shaking hands, or the important hat 

In director Emma Seligman’s “Shiva Baby,” Rachel Sennott plays a young woman named Danielle. The movie follows her in near-real time as she attends a shiva with her parents, repeatedly running into various people that she really, really doesn’t want to talk to. Her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari) is there, as is her ex-girlfriend (Molly Gordon), and that’s not to mention her sugar daddy’s gorgeous wife (Dianna Agron), who Danielle is uncomfortably drawn to.

Nearly the whole movie takes place in this one house, and Danielle feels trapped by social convention in addition to the location. This is a movie about the difficulty of keeping up appearances, about putting on a front in order to be different things to different people. By keeping the action to one house and then filling it with people Danielle’s nervous about talking to, Seligman’s movie becomes an absolute maelstrom of anxiety and tension. Will Danielle slip up? Who’s going to catch her in a lie? And anyway, who does she even want to be?

Colin Farrell stars in “Phone Booth” as a man named Stu. He’s a publicist who’s constantly on his cell phone, which was a relative novelty in 2002, constantly blabbing about his celebrity clients without a care for who can overhear him. After a quick walk-and-talk through Times Square, Stu steps into a phone booth to call a young starlet he’s been hitting on named Pam (Katie Holmes). Trouble is, Stu’s married. After he hangs up with Pam, the phone rings, and Stu is told that there’s someone watching him. That someone has a sniper rifle trained on him. If he leaves the phone booth or hangs up the phone, he dies.

This is quick movie, in and out in 81 minutes. From the time Stu picks up that phone a few minutes into the film to the time the credits roll, the action never lets up. Director Joel Schumacher constantly ratchets up the tension, even though he cheats the single-location conceit a bit by including picture-in-picture shots of the people at the other end of Stu’s phone calls. Still, it’s a clever way to keep the film visually interesting, and it even feels like Schumacher managed to anticipate what FaceTime calls would look like. This is a movie that could only have been made right then, but it’s just as effective today.

Nancy (Blake Lively) is a young woman dealing with a fresh loss. She heads out to the beach to surf the pain away, unaware that she’s about to be trapped on a rock not too far from shore, pinned down by a bloodthirsty shark that’s desperate for a nibble. This is “The Shallows,” and it’s not just one of the best single-location films ever made; it’s also one of the best shark movies of all time.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra smartly makes Nancy’s environment ever-changing, even as she’s stuck in the same spot. She’s there for a long time; the sun is setting and then rising, meaning the light across Blake Lively’s face is always in flux. The tide’s also going in and out, meaning that Nancy’s safe haven is in danger of under the ocean surface; soon she will have no choice but to make a break for it, gnashing jaws be damned. Plus, she’s got an inquisitive seagull — who she calls Steven, of course — along for the adventure.

In other words, there’s always something new to look at — always something surprising to be frightened by — even though the movie’s action is confined largely to this one rock. This isn’t a ranking, but if it were, “The Shallows” would be somewhere toward the top.