Welcome to a new series on Close-Up Culture, where we pair some of our favourite films with their painting soulmate.

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1. The Shining (1980) + The Night Watch – Rembrandt

Something perfectly ordinary made deeply unsettling – the sense that there’s something wrong just behind the surface.

2. Paris, Texas (1984) + Nighthawks – Edward Hopper

The lonely beauty of America at night, where people can sit inches apart and still feel impossibly far away.

3. The Favourite (2018) + Las Meninas – Diego Velázquez

A world of elaborate performances, hidden agendas and shifting power, where everyone is watching everyone else.

4. Mulholland Drive (2001) + The Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dalí

A dreamscape where time melts, identities fracture and reality feels increasingly impossible to hold onto.

5. Her (2013) + Automat – Edward Hopper

The peculiar loneliness of modern life – surrounded by technology, light and people, yet desperately searching for connection.

6. The Lighthouse (2019) + The Isle of the Dead – Arnold Böcklin

A lonely, haunted world at the edge of civilisation, where the landscape itself seems to be closing in.

7. The Piano (1993) + The Lady of Shalott – John William Waterhouse

Romantic beauty wrapped around confinement, longing and a woman fighting to escape the life that’s been prescribed for her.

8. Suspiria (1977) + The Garden of Earthly Delights – Hieronymus Bosch

9. A Ghost Story (2017) + The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog – Caspar David Friedrich

One tiny figure staring into an enormous, unknowable world – a meditation on time, loss and everything that carries on without us.

10. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) + Composition VIII – Wassily Kandinsky

Both strip away the familiar to turn colour, geometry and abstraction into something mysterious and cosmic.