Loneliness is our deepest shame – can cinema help us confront it?

Olivia Laing wrote the book on loneliness. Over a decade ago, the British writer moved to New York City for the love of a man who then called it off. She stayed and sought out artists who anchored her solitude to the city. “I was possessed with a desire to find correlates,” she wrote in 2016’s The Lonely City, “physical evidence that other people had inhabited my state”. The book was both a memoir and a deeply researched biopic of 20th-century artists, among them Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol, who lit up the sensation of loneliness.

There is a paradox to work that is created from an artist’s sense of dislocation – it can welcome the painfully isolated back into the human fold. As one of Laing’s artist subjects, David Wojnarowicz, told photographer Nan Goldin for Interview magazine, “We can all affect each other by being open enough to make the other feel less alienated.”

The latest artist to open up about loneliness is , the filmmaker behind quiet but penetrating dramas about intimacy – these include his breakout film about a one-night-stand less ordinary, (2011), and (2017), the tale of a teenager’s