Feeling sick? Here are 5 movies to watch to help you feel better

Along with some painkillers and mom's chicken soup, the best thing to fight off a cold is taking it easy. CTV News film critic Richard Crouse offers up five movies you can watch to make you feel better (Andrii Zorii / Getty Images)

Along with some painkillers, your mom’s chicken soup and plenty of fluids, the best thing to fight a cold is taking it easy. Rest and relaxation come in many forms, but for me, curling up in front of a movie always makes me feel better.

With that in mind, here’s a list of movies that are just what the doctor ordered.

1. Shutter Island

Feeling feverish? Director Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” the surreal story of two U.S. marshals who uncover a shocking truth about an asylum on a remote island, is the kind of movie that feels like it was dreamed up during a low-grade fever.

Scorsese uses flashbacks, odd and deliberate lapses in continuity, weird camera tricks—he runs the film backwards in one scene, so it looks like smoke is flowing into, rather than out of Leonardo DiCaprio’s cigarette—to create an atmosphere of creeping dread, one in which the viewer, and perhaps even the characters, don’t know what is real and what is not.

Where many of his earlier films like “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are about a state of existence, “Shutter Island” is all about a state of mind. It’s a bold, risk-taking film, ripe with dramatic music, sweeping photography and unapologetically strange storytelling. It’s a story of paranoia, a deeply psychological thriller that pays homage to Hitchcock films like “Vertigo” and “North By Northwest.” Throw in a dollop of “The Snake Pit” and some Mario Bava you get an idea of the film’s feverish tone.

2. Pontypool

The flu can be a drag, but it’s nothing compared to the transmittable disease in “Pontypool,” a bug that turns regular people into flesh eating creeps.

Set entirely inside a small radio station in the basement of a church, the story focuses on announcer Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and call screener Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who use eye-witness accounts to slowly piece together the horrible story that is happening outside their doors.

When the reports turn ominous Mazzy realizes he is at the center of a big story and keeps broadcasting. What he doesn’t realize is that, perhaps, he is helping to spread the disease. “Pontypool” is a movie set in a radio station that plays like a radio show. By and large the action is described and for once the old cliché that what you can’t see is more terrifying that what you can actually see, rings true. Couple that with a mounting sense of doom and you have an edge of your seat thriller.

3. Barefoot in the Park

They say misery loves company, so if you find yourself sneezing and wheezing from a cold, check out “Barefoot in the Park,” the classic romantic comedy starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. They play the uptight Paul and the free-spirited Corie, newlyweds living in a cramped, fifth-floor Greenwich Village apartment.

When Paul refuses to impulsively run barefoot in the park with her, they fight, and he sleeps on the sofa, under a hole in their skylight on a snowy February night. The next morning, he wakes up with a fever, and spends most of the rest of the film with a cold and sneezing. He sneezes at least three times, and does, according to “Major Arcana,” a “collection of movies and tv episodes in which there is sneezing,” a “wonderfully convincing job.”

So come for the sneezes, but stay for the pleasingly performed screwball farce that, although dated, still provides laughs and a wonderful portrait of a couple as they grow comfortable with one another.

4. A Quiet Place

A headache can make it impossible to enjoy anything, but if you want to take your mind off the dull thump in your head and still be entertained, the muted but exciting “A Quiet Place” should do the trick.

Imagine living in complete silence. Never raising your voice over the level of a faint whisper. No music. No heavy footsteps. You can’t even sneeze. Silence. Then imagine your life depends on staying completely noiseless.

It’s great if you’re suffering from a headache, but for the “A Quiet Place’s” Abbott family—and the rest of the world—it the difference between life and death. Their world has been invaded by creatures attracted by sound—any sound—so survival means silence. The silence of the first half of the movie is deafening. There is no spoken dialogue for forty minutes, just dead air.

In the way that many filmmakers use bombast to grab your attention director John Krasinski uses the absence of sound to focus the audience on the situation. Uncluttered and low key, it’s a unique and unsettling horror film, and perfect to soothe the banging in your head.

5. The Big Sick

Finally, most rom coms don’t feature illness as a plot point, but for comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon it was a crucial part of their film’s story. Based on their real lives, “The Big Sick” sees their relationship blossom after she contracts a mysterious illness.

There are no major revelations here, just a carefully balanced look at the immigrant experience—“The rules don’t make sense to me,” Kumail says to his parents. “Why did you bring me here if you didn’t want me to have an American life?”—ambition, family and the nature of true love. It’s funny, but not laugh-a-minute funny, just comfortably charming as it navigates the cultural and medical landmines in the paths of Kumail and Emily (played by Zoe Kazan).

Even when “The Big Sick” is making jokes about terrorism and the “X-Files” it is all heart, a crowd-pleaser that still feels personal and intimate and could be a great pick-me-up when feeling under the weather.