everything's fine, trust me

Films about somebody looking you in the eye and insisting nothing is wrong, while everything about the scene says otherwise.

Sometimes the reassurance is protective. Ma has built her five-year-old son a whole universe inside the ten-by-ten room where they're both trapped in Room, and she'll do anything to keep him from finding out how small it actually is. Conor can't give the monster the one truth it keeps asking for in A Monster Calls: that he's already made his peace with his mother dying. Norman urges his wife to see a therapist about the voices in their lakeside house in What Lies Beneath, treating what she's hearing as a problem in her own head. Nine-year-old twins start to doubt that the bandaged woman who says she's their mother actually is, in Goodnight Mommy, no matter how much she insists otherwise.

Sometimes the person doing the reassuring has the least reason to believe it. Jack Torrance tells his family the isolation at the Overlook Hotel hasn't gotten to him in The Shining, long after it obviously has. Two parents keep their grown children convinced the walled villa behind their gate is the whole of the world in Dogtooth, and know better than anyone how false that is. Betty's Hollywood is a little too perfect from the start in Mulholland Drive, and the film waits a long time to say why. Beau is the least convinced of anyone that he's fine in Beau Is Afraid, and keeps performing a functioning life anyway.

By the end, everyone here has noticed. They're just the last to say so.