Providence

Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais, is available to watch online on iFILM. It is the only English-language film in his career — a Franco-Swiss production with John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, David Warner and Ellen Burstyn.

Novelist Clive Langham, played by Gielgud, cannot sleep the night before his 78th birthday. Sick and drinking, he composes a novel in his head where his adult children become characters and he gives none of them any mercy. Bogarde plays the cold, precise lawyer son; Warner plays the directionless younger one. Resnais shifts between the novel and the real world without signaling the transitions — the viewer is as disoriented as the man doing the imagining.

Screenwriter David Mercer built it as a study of how a writer's imagination devours the people closest to him. Stream Providence (1977) online on iFILM.