| # | Film | Language | Where to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Piku (2015) | Hindi | — |
| 2 | Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl (2020) | Hindi | Netflix |
| 3 | Deiva Thirumagal (2011) | Tamil | — |
| 4 | Drishyam (2013) | Malayalam | JioHotstar |
| 5 | Leave No Trace (2018) | English | — |
| 6 | Aftersun (2022) | English | Mubi |
| 7 | The Father (2020) | English | — |
Some of my favourite films are really negotiations between a father and a daughter. The love is there, but so is the friction—the unsaid thing, the overprotected future, the person changing in front of you.
These seven don’t pretend the bond is simple—they just make it feel true, even when it hurts. They span Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and English cinema, and they all understand that love is only half the work.
Piku (2015)
Piku is a Hindi comedy-drama that puts a daughter, her ageing father and a rented car on the road from Delhi to Kolkata. The father is stubbornly, hilariously preoccupied with his bowels, and Piku is exhausted by him, yet the film never reduces either of them to a joke. It belongs here because it treats their bickering as a love language—irritation, duty and tenderness all tangled together. Watching it feels like being inside a family argument that suddenly makes you tear up, because you recognise the care hiding in every complaint.
Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl (2020)
Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl is a Hindi biopic about a young woman determined to become an Air Force pilot in a world that keeps asking her to stay small. Her father is her biggest cheerleader, but the film wisely lets him be a man of his time—he hesitates, he fumbles, he still chooses her. It belongs on this list because it shows a father’s support as something learned, not automatic. Watching it feels like being gently pushed to ask for the life you want, with a parent’s voice behind you that isn’t perfect but is present.
Deiva Thirumagal (2011)
Deiva Thirumagal is a Tamil drama about a man with an intellectual disability who is raising his little girl with a kind of wonder most adults lose. The film could have treated his difference as a gimmick; instead, it treats his devotion as the truest thing on screen. It belongs here because it never asks us to pity him—it asks us to sit with how fiercely and purely he loves his daughter. Watching it feels tender and a little overwhelming, the kind of film that sneaks past your defences and leaves you undone.
Drishyam (2013)
Drishyam is a Malayalam thriller about an ordinary cable operator whose family gets caught in a crisis, and the meticulous lengths he goes to in order to protect them. The plotting is razor-sharp, but the engine underneath is simpler: a father determined to keep his daughter’s future intact. It belongs on this list because it shows paternal love as strategy—cool, desperate and a little frightening. Watching it feels like holding your breath while someone rewrites the rules, all for the child at the centre of the story.
Leave No Trace (2018)
Leave No Trace is an English-language drama about a father and his teenage daughter living off the grid in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their survival looks peaceful until the outside world presses in, and the film quietly questions who is protecting whom. It belongs here because it refuses to paint the father as a villain or a hero—just a man whose idea of safety may not fit his daughter’s life. Watching it feels like walking through damp woods in silence, and realising the most dangerous thing between them isn’t the wilderness.
Aftersun (2022)
Aftersun is an English-language memory piece about a woman looking back at a package holiday she took with her father as a child. It unfolds like a home video you thought you understood, until the adult re-watches it and notices everything the camera didn’t say. It belongs here because it captures how daughters learn their fathers too late, if at all. Watching it feels sunlit and sad at once, like trying to hold a memory that keeps shifting under your fingers.
The Father (2020)
The Father is an English-language drama that puts us inside the mind of an ageing man losing his grip on time, rooms and faces. Anthony Hopkins is astonishing, but the film belongs on this list because of Olivia Colman as his daughter, who must love a man who is disappearing before her eyes. It understands that a daughter’s devotion can mean making impossible choices while still showing up. Watching it feels disorienting and quietly devastating, like being trapped in a tender nightmare you don’t want to leave.
That’s my watchlist. I’ve probably left out the one you’d fight for, so tell me: which father-daughter film gets it right for you? I’m always looking for the next one that will wreck me in the best way.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
