Best Abortion Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of abortion cinema — measured across 1,849 indexed frames from 27 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Abortion films over-index on apron, beanie and tiled wall — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Happening (2021)
Audrey DiwanDP Laurent TangyIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →
This is the story of Anne, a young woman who decides to abort to finish her studies and escape the social constraints of a working-class family. France in 1963: a society that censures women's desires. And sex in general. This simple but cruel story follows the itinerary of a woman who decides to go against the law. Anne has only a little time before her. Her exams are just around the corner, and her baby bump is growing fast.
- 2
Enter The Void (2009)
Gaspar NoéDP Benoît DebieIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Tokyo's nasty underside, seen primarily through the eyes of Oscar, a heavy drug user, whose sister Linda is a stripper. Oscar also has flashbacks to his childhood when trauma upends the siblings. Oscar's drug-fed hallucinations alter Tokyo's already-disconcerting nights, and after the police shoot him, he can float above and look down: on his sister's sorrow, on the rooms of a love hotel, and on life at even a molecular level. The spectrum's colors can be beautiful; it's people's colorless lives that can be ugly. And what of afterlife, is there more than a void?
- 3
Blue Jay (2016)
Alexandre LehmannDP Alexandre LehmannIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Beginning - At first they seem very, awkward and of course they have nothing to say to each other, it's been years. They go out to get some coffee and they bond for a while, you start to see their friendship, Amanda seems reserved whilst Jim seems more forward and more talkative. It just happens that they both left their hometown, sort of symbolizes their fear of having to confront their past for years to come. But they both come back and happen to run into each other, just coincidental.
- 4
4 months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
Cristian MungiuDP Oleg MutuIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Romania, 1987, the brutal Ceausescu communist regime is in place; birth control is illegal and abortion is a crime punishable by death. Gabita (Laura Vasliu) is almost five months into an unwanted pregnancy and in meek desperation turns to her friend and roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) for help in organizing an illegal termination. Unfortunate circumstances force the two women to use an unwanted male abortionist, Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). The bleakness of the storyline expresses a dark socio-political critique in the twilight years of a repressive dictatorship.
- 5
Céline SciammaDP Claire MathonIMDb 8.0TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →
In 18th-century France young painter Marianne, is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse without her knowing. Therefore, Marianne must observe her model by day to paint her portrait at night. Day by day, the two women become closer as they share Héloïse's last moments of freedom before the impending wedding.
- 6
Blue Valentine (2010)
Derek CianfranceDP Andrij ParekhIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Dean Pereira and Cindy Heller Pereira are a young, working class married couple - Dean currently working as a painter, and Cindy working as a nurse in a medical clinic - with a young daughter named Frankie. Despite their relatively tender ages, they are both ravaged by the life they've eked out together and by the experiences they've had leading into their marriage. Dean, a high school drop out, comes from a broken home, where he never really had a mother figure. He never saw himself getting married or having a family despite falling in love at first sight with Cindy. He doesn't have any professional ambition beyond his current work - which he enjoys since he feels he can knock off a beer at 8 o'clock in the morning without it affecting his work - although Cindy believes he has so much more potential in life. Cindy also comes from a dysfunctional family, with her own mother and father not setting an example of a harmonious married or family life. One of her previous serious relationships was with Bobby Ontario, that relationship which has a profound affect on many aspects of her marriage to Dean. Dean and Cindy head off on an overnight getaway together without Frankie, the getaway which may provide a clearer picture if their marriage can survive its many issues.
- 7
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Tom FordDP Seamus McGarveyIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →
Amy Adamsas Susan Morrow
Jake Gyllenhaalas Tony Hastings / Edward Sheffield
Michael Shannonas Bobby Andes
A "story inside a story," in which the first part follows a woman named Susan who receives a book manuscript from her ex-husband, a man she left 20 years earlier, asking for her opinion. The second element follows the actual manuscript, called "Nocturnal Animals," which revolves around a man whose family vacation turns violent and deadly. It also continues to follow the story of Susan, who finds herself recalling her first marriage and confronting some dark truths about herself.
- 8
Swallow (2020)
Carlo Mirabella-DavisDP Katelin ArizmendiIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Against the backdrop of insufferable domestic ennui, the soft-spoken former saleswoman and newlywed housewife, Hunter, is struggling to stretch the bars of her gilded cage, a lavish and immaculate modernist villa in New York, even though she seems to have it all. But, more and more, as sad Hunter tries, unsuccessfully, to meet her controlling family's expectations, compliance turns into submission, obedience transforms into obsession, and pica, a compulsive eating disorder, starts to take over. Now, swallowing non-nutritive objects and engaging in increasingly impossible tasks becomes Hunter's dangerous newfound addiction, and there's no telling how far she'll go to maintain a false and fleeting sense of power. Who can save Hunter from herself?
- 9
Eliza HittmanDP Hélène LouvartIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →
Inseparable best friends and cousins Autumn and Skylar precariously navigate the vulnerability of female adolescence in rural Pennsylvania. When Autumn mysteriously falls pregnant, she's confronted by conservative legislation without mercy for blue-collar women seeking abortions. With Skylar's unfailing support and bold resourcefulness, money to fund the procedure is secured and the duo board a bus bound for New York state to find the help Autumn needs.
- 10
Titane (2021)
Julia DucournauDP Ruben ImpensIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Alexia suffers a terrible skull injury and has a titanium plate fitted into her head. When she gets out of the hospital, she rejects her parents and embraces passionately the car that almost killed her. The coming years she has problems with her sexuality and meets Vincent. Vincent is a tortured man who tries to preserve his strength by injecting steroids into his aging body. Will they find a way to deal with their emotional problems?
What abortion films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a abortion frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — apron is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- apron6.7×
- beanie4.7×
- tiled wall3.9×
- striped shirt3.2×
- hoodie2.4×
- mirror2.2×
- pillow1.8×
- doorway1.8×
How abortion films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate abortion from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 15%widevs 20% baseline
- 90%eye levelvs 69% baseline
What breaks the pattern
First Reformed (2017) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,849 frames from 27 films carrying the abortion label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/abortion
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