10 Movies That Ought to Have a Villain But Don't

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]So, if there's one thing that makes the plot of most movies chug along, it is the villain, the bad guy, the antagonist, the arch-nemesis.

[00:00:09]And every narrative feature has one, or does it? These films certainly feel like they ought to have a villain, and we darned well remember there being someone behind all the hurdles our heroes had to jump. But if we take another look, well, things aren't as good versus evil as they seem. I'm Gareth, this is WhatCulture, and here are movies that ought to have a villain, but don't.

[00:00:30]Funny Pages. Young man versus society is given a grimy twist in Funny Pages, where teenager and aspiring comic artist Robert Blektman finds himself rebelling against the small world of New Jersey. A twisted coming-of-age story, the film doesn't feature a single likable or forgivable character, except for Robert's art teacher, Mr. Katano, who dies suddenly in the opening scene.

[00:00:56]Perhaps, then, this is the cipher for the entire movie, as good characters don't have a place in a world that is unfriendly, unforgiving, and surprisingly real at the same time.

[00:01:07]Robert abandons his family home and finds himself a dank basement apartment in one of New Jersey's roughest areas, sharing with two older men who live in filth and know no boundaries in terms of normality or sexuality. While he simultaneously enters the orbit of a whole cavalcade of weirdos, no-hopers, and casually sinister characters. But despite the fact that so many of these characters definitely have the makings of an antagonist, nobody really commits to the bit. Robert comes out the other side of the film as much the brat as he went in. And though he is a product of his society, the only person to blame for his behavior is, well, himself. No outright villains anywhere though. Knock at the Cabin. Knock at the Cabin, M.

[00:01:50]Night Shyamalan's return to form, brings four seemingly suicidal strangers into a gay couple's holiday home, Armed with homemade weapons and apparently representing the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Yet, despite their sinister bearing and the fact that they physically compel the family to stay put, the four strangers profess to have no intention of causing their captives harm. Yeah, right, right? Well, turns out they're actually telling the truth.

[00:02:16]As over the course of 100 nail-biting minutes, the only persons the horsemen harm are themselves, ritualistically sacrificing their troop as the clocks count down to an impending apocalypse.

[00:02:27]They posit that if the family sacrifice one of their own, the end of the world will be avoided. No pressure. While we would expect to take this line with 10 pinches of salt, it is borne out in the film's conclusion when the sacrifice of dedicated co-dad Eric by his loving partner Andrew does indeed put a stopper in an Armageddon that has planes falling from the sky and mega tsunamis chomping off great chunks of coastline. The four horsemen are the good guys. And the sweet family are the good guys. And God or whoever sent the horsemen their visions is probably a good guy. So, blame the weather, I guess, or I don't know. Cocoon. Not all films about aliens living among us have to be Body Snatchers or They Live. Sometimes they can just be a band of goodens willing to share their immortality with the local old folk. Indeed, although Cocoon has been lost among its harder-edged contemporaries, the Ron Howard-directed feature won several Academy Awards in its time and features a surprisingly uplifting portrayal of our outer space visitors compared to many of its stablemates. The film sees the residents of a Florida nursing home uncover a fountain of youth in their backyard, which allows them to not just mend their aching bones, but relive some of their glory days. Sounds like a blast. No surprise is that the supposed fountain is the result of alien intervention then. Little do the old folks know, extraterrestrials known as Antareans have been using the swimming pool next door to store their cocoons. And their effluent has been providing everyone that rosy boost. Despite this impending collision course being fertile ground for an interplanetary war, the old folks wind up making a pact with the Antareans to travel with them back to, you guessed it, Antarea and live forever in peace.

[00:04:13]American Fiction. Cord Jefferson's directorial debut, American Fiction, has its flaws, not least the weird Wizard of Oz-like ending in which the main conflicts don't so much get resolved as swept off the narrative plane in one fell swoop. Nonetheless, it is a scathing satire against the contemporary literary scene, which prizes identity far above the writing itself. Tenured professor and published literary author Monk struggles against a world which only wants to see his blackness on the page. And despite being up against a flurry of white folks who fetishize the color of his skin and their misconceptions of what his genuine experience may be, none of them qualify as an authentic villain. Bearing in mind, this is a film that begins when its protagonist embarks on a tour of fraudulence under the guise of an ex-gangbanger on the run from the law, and ends when the FBI bust into an award ceremony guns blazing, there really ought to be a clear antagonist here, but there just isn't. What there is is an entire establishment shored up in office blocks around the globe and hell-bent on raking in cash from poverty porn. And you can't exactly throw that down a death star. Afghanistan. Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. The precise intersection between West Coast millennial and Gen Z culture, Halina Reijn's influencer horror Bodies, Bodies, Bodies takes some major faces from the social media generation, Rachel Sennott and Pete Davidson included, and turns them loose on a mansion in the woods movie that redefines its genre and tropes. The premise is familiar enough.

[00:05:43]A group of twenty-somethings hole up in a remote building cut off from mainstream society by great distances, bad weather, and lack of cellular reception. Then, when a hide-and-seek style party game has one of their group turn up dead, the fake friends turn on each other while trying to save themselves from whoever done it. As the bodies, bodies, bodies pile high, high, high, and the guest numbers whittle down, it seems impossible that one of them is not the killer pulling the strings. Well, spoiler alert, the big twist of Bodies is that there is no villain at all. The entire film is just a bunch of privileged loudmouths arguing themselves to death, stumbling into mishap after mishap with unintentionally fatal consequences. Who do you got to see in that coming? AI: Artificial Intelligence. Few films feel as dark or hopeless as Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence. In the film, we follow Android boy child David on his harrowing and unrelenting journey from the cradle to the grave. Across thousands of years, he encounters the worst of humanity along the way, who want to exploit him and harm him and can't find it in themselves to love him the way he does them. Break your damn heart. He journeys past the end of humanity and the end of the Earth as we know it, into the time of advanced AI life forms, looking and hoping for the happy ending he deserves. But, in the face of all the cruelties and injustices David witnesses, and which we must witness being thrust upon him, there is no overarching schema, no malicious villain pulling the strings. We might want to blame his creator, Professor Hobby, but he's just a man, an inventor trying to bring the next line of his product to life, so to speak. No, there's just no bad guy here, is there?

[00:07:24]In the end, there are only humans and their emotional, financial, and existential avarice. The Banshees of Inisherin. Another master collaboration between writer-director Martin McDonagh and his stars, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin dramatizes the follies of the Irish civil conflicts in microcosm. On the remote island of Inisherin, literally translated as the island of Ireland, Pádraic hits the pub one day to find his best friend Colm has abruptly put an end to their lifelong friendship and wants nothing more to do with him.

[00:07:56]The film charts Pádraic's misbegotten attempts to repair this friendship, which gradually grows to enmity with each of his bungled attempts, resulting in a dead pet for Pádraic, self-amputated fingers for Colm, and a previously peaceful island community in turmoil. Yeah, despite the severity of this enmity, Colm never becomes a villain. He is stubborn, hard-headed, and resolved not to change his mind no matter what his ex-friend does, but always casts to the part of misunderstood co-protagonist. The absence of a genuine villain, a person unto whom we can attribute our feelings of hurt and blame, is felt all the more potently in a film that has multi-digit amputations, donkey manslaughter, and a young man's suicide. Enter the Void.

[00:08:41]With Enter the Void, Gaspar Noé guides us on a DMT trip to the other side. When drug dealer Oscar is shot in the head in the first act, and his soul takes a wild ride through past and present. This begins a twisty personal narrative offset against a backdrop of psychedelic visuals that dip in and out throughout, channeling, modernizing, and redefining the iconic stargate sequence from the director's favorite movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Paying homage while doing something post-modern and new, Tokyo itself provides fertile imagery for the film's visual eccentricities. The neon and claustrophobia of the metropolis shaping Oscar's physical and post-physical journeys, and offering some pretty grimy and miserable corners in which to unfold a tragic narrative.

[00:09:30]Botched deals, drug rings, abortions, and car crashes, there is not much Noé won't throw at us. But, while the directors Irreversible and Climax have several bad actors at their core, pushing the drama along against their protagonist's wills, Enter the Void lacks that evil figure to coalesce around. Like the Greek tragedies, the miseries throughout Oscar and his sister Linda's lives are mostly the product of luck, chance, [music] fate, and their own character flaws. But, all's well that ends well, eh? And Enter the Void definitely concludes with a a happy ending. Corner Office. A recent movie that has neither had the love nor exposure it definitely deserves. Joachim Back's Corner Office remains something of a hidden gem for those of us who still enjoy white-collar malaise. Our story is a chapter in the life of pencil-pusher Orson, beginning with the commencement of his latest job in a thoroughly gray office and ending with his firing. After a slow burn-in and a few misunderstandings between himself and his coworkers, Orson discovers a lush, spacious, and private office with 1970s decor and all the mod cons any self-respecting office worker could ever need. This becomes Orson's go-to place to escape his colleagues and get some serious work done. The dream. There's only one problem. The office is not an office, but a mental state produced by a mind fractured on years of tedium. And when Orson goes there, he's actually just standing catatonic in the corridor staring at the wall. A truly Kafkaesque drama, the enemy of Corner Office is not any one person, but the limits and constraints of bureaucracy and society.

[00:11:08]And despite doing everything that they can to keep Orson from his happy place Corner Office, his colleagues are just run-of-the-mill office workers trying to get on with their day without having to deal with whatever strangeness the big guy brings to the mix. Beau Is Afraid.

[00:11:22]After the one-two punch of Hereditary and Midsommar, the last thing anyone expected director Ari Aster to do was put together a modern-day tragicomedy horror retelling of Homer's Greek epic poem The Odyssey. Eponymous protagonist Beau has every reason to be afraid, living in the most hostile world of all, in which his neighbors blame him for noise that he didn't make, suburbanites blame him for how bad they messed up their own child, his mother blames him for not loving her enough, and society seems to blame him merely for being alive. He suffers physically, mentally, and emotionally from the film's first scene to its last. But who does he have to blame for it all? Beau's journey is bloody, gory, grim, and difficult to watch, and yet lacks a clear and discernible villain. While The Odyssey has Poseidon as its arch antagonist, pulling the strings of fate in an attempt to waylay Odysseus on his journey home, Beau Is Afraid exists in a world without gods and existential meaning makers. Thus, there is no architect of Beau's trials or destiny.

[00:12:22]He has been adrift most of his life from family, friends, community, society, and these are merely the closing days of a fated, yet inconsequential [music] life.