By Jake Skubish

Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked Americans about the issues that define our lives: Our religious beliefs, our outlook on the economy, what we think of each other. This interpersonal component is a fascinating window into the sturdiness of American society, and one question is particularly telling: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?”

When the GSS first asked this question, Americans were split: 46% said people can be trusted, while 50% said you can’t be too careful. But the inclination toward distrust has grown consistently over the past 50 years; 2022 was the first time more than two-thirds of Americans said people cannot be trusted.

Perhaps this cynicism is justified. As 2024 gets underway we face the prospect of a presidential election that seems destined to worsen this trust gap, that seems sure to make our citizenry more adversarial even if the worst outcome is avoided. Meanwhile, the dawn of artificial intelligence threatens to question the veracity of the news and flood our most popular sources of online entertainment with junk. How can we say whether people can be trusted if we can’t be sure they’re even real people?

The best movies of 2023 explored the thorniness of trust, with perspectives ranging from the deeply pessimistic to the unabashedly optimistic. Do these films suggest we can afford to rely on others, or is it wiser to only trust ourselves?

It seems that Americans are increasingly aligned on this question with the protagonist in The Killer, a hitman (Michael Fassbender) who repeats his strict code throughout the film. “Trust no one,” he says. “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight. Forbid empathy. Each and every step of the way, ask yourself, “What’s in it for me?””

David Fincher pulls off a clever subversion of the tropes of the contract assassin story in The Killer. On the surface, the film appears to follow the typical beats: A ruthless, emotionless killer faces a change of heart when a woman he cares about is put in harm’s way, propelling him down a path of vengeance and bloodshed in her name. But a closer reading of The Killer reveals Fincher forging something much, much darker than that.

The protagonist’s code is not something he unlearns in his narrative arc; he sticks to it all the way through. His journey was never personal: It was always about ensuring he could continue to live the life he wants to live. When his romantic partner is hospitalized after an assault, his partner’s brother Marcus (Emiliano Pernía) recounts what she told him. “There are worse things than what they did to me,” he relays. “Can you imagine? Worse things?” The killer replies firmly: “Nothing like this will ever be allowed to happen again.” With this exchange Fincher establishes the expectation of a tale of personal revenge. But by the end, it’s clear that what the killer really meant was that nothing like this would ever be allowed to happen again to him. “Maybe you’re just like me,” Fassbender narrates at the end of The Killer. “One of the many.” We are all this way, Fincher suggests. Individualism is a sickness, and The Killer is a diagnosis of an epidemic for which we have given up on seeking a cure.

Other 2023 films didn’t quite go this far: Rather than swearing off other people entirely, they explored the wariness of trusting strangers, often strangers that characters were forced to interact with. In The Royal Hotel, friends Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna (Julia Garner) travel across Australia, earning money to keep the trip going through a work-travel program. The program assigns them a bartending gig, and the pair soon find themselves transported from a party boat on the waters of Sydney to a remote mining town populated by leering, insistent men.

The Royal Hotel delights in the opacity of its characters’ full selves. There’s no question Liv and Hanna are sensible to be cautious about these men, but director Kitty Green always keeps the audience guessing about everyone’s intentions, and never lets the men fall into obvious clichés. The women oscillate about who they can trust, who they can’t, and what might be wrought — pleasure or terror — by tipping in either direction. Threats hasten these decisions, and they ultimately come to only trust who they always have: each other. Between The Royal Hotel and Green’s previous film, The Assistant, few working directors are as skilled at lacing every scene of a film with suffocating tension, which Green draws from the uncertainty women face about trusting the men around them.

Interacting with strangers need not always be so treacherous, however. In two of the most heartwarming films of the year, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and The Holdovers, protagonists forge unexpected bonds with a group of strangers. Dungeons and Dragons, one of the most joyous, creative adventure films in recent years, cleverly puts its characters in a situation that often serves as the template for the classic role-playing game: Each has their own motivation to complete the same mission. Somewhere along the way, their regard for each other becomes just as important as their self-interested goals. The Holdovers similarly features characters who are thrown together, a trio forced to grow their relationships as they spend the holiday break together at a northeast prep school.

*Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves*

In both films, our heroes are deeply cranky about this arrangement; both Edgin (Chris Pine) and Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) think they’d be better off alone. Yet both learn to see the value of giving more of themselves to others, even when it seems like a more prudent choice to close yourself off. “I thought I could make a difference ... but the world doesn’t make sense anymore,” Paul laments at a holiday party. “Integrity is a punch line. Trust is just a name on a bank.” Lydia (Carrie Preston), a fellow faculty member at the party, replies, “If that's all true, then now is when they most need someone like you.” Dungeons and Dragons and The Holdovers each trace this path toward recognizing how trust can offer meaning in a lonely world, yet neither ever feels treacly in doing so. The trust that each troupe fosters carries weight not because their relationships are perfect, but because they are imperfect and choose connection anyway.

And then there’s May December, the most deliciously slippery movie of the year. Distrust abounds as a function of curious disbelief: Could an adult woman really do that to a child and feel no remorse? Could the child really grow into an adult who stayed with her of his own accord? These are the questions Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) asks when she meets with Gracie (Julianne Moore), the subject of a decades-old tabloid scandal, whom Elizabeth will be portraying in a forthcoming film. Gracie was imprisoned for having sex with a 13-year-old, Joe (Charles Melton), whom she went on to marry and have children with.

The film operates as a cascade of empathy and deceit, capturing the kindness and pain and desire and monstrosity in its characters’ impulses all at once. Elizabeth’s interactions with Gracie and Joe are rooted in distrust and dishonesty: Gracie wants a fully human portrayal in Elizabeth’s film, a portrayal she may not deserve; Elizabeth avows that’s exactly what she aims to deliver, even though her film seems salaciously interested in the Gracie-Joe relationship. “It’s hard to trust that you’re going to represent things as they were,” Joe says to Elizabeth. Yet her presence opens up new feelings in Joe, who begins to question his own understanding of things as they were with Gracie.

May December is a deeply sad, and often quite funny, exploration of these dynamics, and offers no simple answers about whether people can be trusted. Sometimes people are much more complicated than they appear. Other times, they are exactly the snake they seem to be at first blush.

The ambiguities of May December are a matter of differences in perception: The facts are agreed upon, but the interpretation of the facts is not. But what happens to trust in a world where reality itself is called into question? No 2023 film put this into starker terms than M. Night Shyamalan’s patient horror-thriller Knock at the Cabin. The film opens with a young child (Kristen Cui) sitting in a forest as a giant of a man (Dave Bautista) emerges from the trees and approaches her. Her vulnerability, contrasted with his colossal stature, presents a threat. Is he a friendly passerby, or a harbinger of violence? If you ask him, the answer is both. As Leonard, Bautista brings a gentle temperament and a brutal message to the child and her parents (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff): Unless the family chooses to sacrifice one of their own, the apocalypse will soon commence.

Knock at the Cabin cleverly poses two dilemmas: Who the family would choose to sacrifice, of course, but also whether they can trust that this mandate is true. Shyamalan chips away at the ridiculousness of the premonition as the film moves along, giving slivers of new information to the family and suggesting the intruders’ vision might be true. But definitive proof remains elusive, and the family must make a choice based on incomplete information. Unlike May December, family is a bedrock. What we know about the outside world may be increasingly tenuous, but for Shyamalan, we can trust our family to serve our best interests in spite of this uncertainty.

Perhaps even more somber than Shyamalan’s apocalyptic vision is Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, a brightly lit drama set in a remote 1950s western desert town, the sunny aesthetics of which complicate the film’s underlying sadness. The town draws a hodge-podge of youth scientists, despondent parents, and military personnel for a ceremony honoring the scientists’ achievements. In the background, atomic bomb tests ignite and high-speed police chases clutter the town’s lone street — a changing, violent world looms for this sleepy locale. Like Knock at the Cabin, the characters’ understanding of the world is thrown into further disarray by an unexpected intruder: An alien, who makes a brief appearance in Asteroid City before jetting off in its spaceship.

Anderson uses this chance encounter as an opportunity to examine how people struggle to make sense of the world. Addressing her class after the extraterrestrial encounter, teacher June (Maya Hawke) says, “I’m going to attempt to proceed with the lesson plan I originally prepared ... there are still only nine planets in the solar system as far as we know.” A child in her class, Billy (Brayden Frasure), then raises his hand. “Except now there’s an alien!” he wisely points out. June admits this is true, and the acknowledgement throws off her curriculum.

Characters throughout Anderson’s film confront such existential crises as they wonder aloud if they can trust that the way they’ve been taught to live and think is correct. The most emotionally resonant instance of this crisis occurs late in the film, when the actor playing Augie (Jason Schwartzman) in the “Asteroid City” play walks off the set in the middle of production and goes backstage to ask the director: “Am I doing it right?” The question is posed as Schwartzman stares straight into the camera; the question is for us, and it’s not about the play, but our lives. “Do I just keep doing it?” he asks. “Without knowing anything?” It is a question of trust, of accepting that we can live life without knowing its meaning. The director (Adrien Brody) responds with an assured, if unsatisfying, answer. “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.” Asteroid City finds less certainty than Knock at the Cabin in the wake of world-changing information, offering a more sobering if grounded take on reality. Can we trust that what we know of the world is true, or complete? No. But there’s no choice except to move forward anyway.

The existence of cute little aliens remains unconfirmed in our world, but 2023 saw the rise of another form of intelligence that called into question the information we receive. The proliferation of artificial intelligence as a widespread consumer product and cultural talking point may have been the most important development of 2023, and M3GAN caught the trend just as the year began. Marketed as a horror film but mostly operating as a comedy, M3GAN follows a young girl named Cady (Violet McGraw) who befriends an artificially intelligent doll (Amie Donald) as she copes with a recent loss. Cady grows to trust the doll more than her human caretaker Gemma (Allison Williams), even as M3GAN becomes increasingly violent in a way her corporate overlords can’t reign in.

The lesson at the core of M3GAN is straightforward: What if the real horror is Big Tech? Yet James Wan and Akela Cooper’s screenplay finds nuance within this trope, crafting a film that’s smart about the ways in which we pursue overly complex solutions to both simple and profound problems. Sometimes you just need to fix the hole in your fence; sometimes you need to honestly confront your emotions and traumas. One thing you can’t ever do, the film suggests, is trust corporate tech behemoths to do the right thing. Yet the film is less of a warning than a resignation, a preview of how people will increasingly trust AI bots as friends and lovers as they spurn the real thing. A byproduct of distrusting other humans, it seems, is trusting nonhumans.

If M3GAN is a premonition of the dawn of AI, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is a spectacle hinting at just how far our AI future may advance. The franchise again finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) sprinting around the globe, wooing sexy spies, and jumping off of various precipices at great heights. This time around, his main adversary is a dangerous AI system known as “the Entity.” As in M3GAN, AI is a threat to human welfare, but Mission: Impossible has less to say about the technology than it does about the people fighting against it. An opponent that looks like a MacBook screensaver, it turns out, does not make for a dynamic movie villain. But Cruise is as thrillingly energetic as ever, and the film succeeds because of his unyielding quest to one-up himself with each new action sequence. Hollywood was brought to a standstill this year over labor concerns about the prevalence of AI in film. If Hollywood executives were smart, they would look at Cruise’s latest heroics as yet another sign that charisma is not a realm in which AI will be replacing stars any time soon.

In a sense Mission: Impossible is just as much about AI as about how governments can’t be trusted with it, and 2023 abounded with films suffused with a distrust of government. Three of the best were one of the year’s biggest blockbusters, the year’s most audacious arthouse film, and one of its most modest dramas: Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest, and Reality. Director Christopher Nolan crafts Oppenheimer as a grim tragedy, and amid the disturbing beauty of the big atomic bomb explosion he never once lets that tragedy slip out of view. Not for a second. Nolan is often thought of as one of our great technocrats, a blockbuster filmmaker who values scale over a story simply told. Maybe so, but it shouldn’t go unnoticed how ruthlessly honest Oppenheimer is about the evils of the American government. Few American movies on this scale have ever been so direct about this, and I still can’t believe this sinister moral reckoning made more than $900 million. Before the Manhattan Project commences, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) articulates why he’s moving forward with this military project: “I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon. But I know the Nazis can't.” The film settles on the idea that he may have been right on both counts; giving trust may be folly in a relationship where you have no real power. Oppenheimer positions trust in government as a measure that may be a practical bargain in the short-term but calamity in the long run.

The Zone of Interest takes us to the other side of World War II as it follows the Nazi officer presiding over the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here there is no consideration of whether the government is doing the right thing; Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), operating on behalf of the Nazi Party, is a man devoid of morality. Höss and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) put their trust in the Nazi government to deliver them the serene middle class life they think they deserve. It does, for a time, at the cost of the genocide of millions of Jews. Director Jonathan Glazer’s film is a masterpiece, an astonishing vision of the monstrosity of whiteness and the human capacity for evil told in a visual and aural language I’ve never quite seen or heard before. Like Oppenheimer, it is also an urgent act of historical preservation. The government can be counted on to commit terrible atrocities without a second of regret by the individuals carrying them out. Recognizing these atrocities, and comprehending that they can happen again, is a moral imperative.

Reality takes us to a present-day mistrust of the government. The drama is based on the real-life story of Reality Winner (portrayed by Sydney Sweeney), an NSA employee who leaked information to the media about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The film takes a formally inventive approach to Winner’s story: The screenplay is the word-for-word transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of Winner at her home. By pulling its material directly from government documents, Reality makes an airtight case against the government’s desperate maneuvers to prosecute the dissemination of information that its citizens deserve to know about. Director Tina Satter also uses the first-hand source material to show how far the story we come to know via the media strays from what really happened. Reality is a plea to not only pay attention to what the government may be keeping from us, but also to not too quickly trust that the story we think we know is the truth.

Artificial intelligence, faceless government infrastructures, perfect strangers: Perhaps it makes sense that we shouldn’t lend them our unconditional trust. But what of the people with whom we have forged the most intimate relationships? The answers from some of 2023’s best films are murky. In Priscilla and Killers of the Flower Moon, women enter into relationships with men whom they very well know have predatory tendencies, although the extent to which they fully understand this unfolds differently over the course of each film. In Killers, Mollie (Lily Gladstone) begins her marriage to Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) with trepidation: He’s a sometimes charming, mostly shifty white man in a town where white men are eager to get a piece of the oil-rich land owned by Mollie and the Osage Nation. Director Martin Scorsese eludes a simple narrative in revealing what Mollie knows of Ernest’s sins, but it struck me that she took the risk of marrying a wolf, despite the terror he may have portended, because she felt she deserved to give space in her life to love and desire.

The same goes for Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny), who gets involved with Elvis (Jacob Elordi) with far less initial caution than Mollie — her awareness of the situation’s pitfalls grows later. Both women suffer as a result of perhaps trusting these men for too long. Yet as each of them say goodbye to these undeserving men late in the respective films, they do so with less righteousness than an unexpected dose of grace. These men may not have deserved their trust, but their transgressions are their own to live with. Mollie and Priscilla are moving on to the work of building a life without these men, carrying with them the sorrow of the time they’ll never get to reclaim.

In other films, once-trusted family members lose their standing as the story unfolds. In You Hurt My Feelings, the disintegration in trust follows from a minor incident: Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) tell his friend that he didn’t like her latest book, even though he told Beth he did. The lie takes Beth into a tailspin as she questions whether she can trust anything her husband has told her. Despite director Nicole Holofcener’s typical neuroticism and acerbic ensemble, You Hurt My Feelings is an empathetic story about dishonesty in relationships without resorting to a finger-wagging lesson on either side of the decision to lie to your partner. Sometimes we need to hear the truth, or tell it. Sometimes we need to hear a lie, or tell one. It’s all part of the deal, and our love isn’t less for it.

In The Iron Claw, meanwhile, any love present in Fritz Von Erich’s (Holt McCallany) tutelage of his sons is harder to find. The boys revere their father as a hard-nosed wrestling legend, and follow him into the ring. But as tragedy befalls the Von Erichs again and again, they question whether these events are random or downstream of a disciplinary style that only brings pain. Kevin (Zac Efron) manages to emerge on the other side of this familial model with a more compassionate way forward. As with Priscilla and Killers there are costs to the decline in trust, yet there is also reason to think one can come out of such challenging situations stronger than before.

Standing apart from every other great film in 2023 is Wonka, Paul King’s musical extravaganza about Roald Dahl’s famous chocolatier. As with Paddington 2, King’s project with Wonka seems almost a direct response to the growing lack of trust people feel toward one another. Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) enters a world in which bad intentions are commonplace: A malicious innkeeper locks patrons into forced labor with manipulative contracts and junk fees; a corrupt police force and clergy keep any whispers of societal change at bay; an oligopoly of wealthy chocolatiers fix prices and dilute their product, making the limits of their imagination everyone’s problem. This confluence of wickedness leads Noodle (Calah Lane), a child trapped at the inn, to think in the way an increasing number of us seem to be. “The greedy beat the needy,” she tells Wonka, in a clever callback to the ethos of Charlie’s victory in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. “That’s just the way of the world.”

Wonka is unconvinced that this is the end of the sentence: If this is the way of the world, then the logical next step is to change the world. And the way to do so is to change it in cooperation with others. Willy tells Noodle that he has always “relied on the kindness of strangers” to get by, and despite the many hardships he’s faced, this optimism has a funny way of working out. There’s nothing in the world easier than cynicism, and nothing harder than making something the opposite — earnest, joyous, never naive; clear-eyed about the villains of the world yet never yielding an ounce of will power in trying to change things for the better, together. Such is the magic of Wonka, and why it is one of the most deceptively daring films of the year: In a world in which people are increasingly pessimistic about one another, one of the most provocative things a work of art can do is suggest with its whole heart that perhaps we’d be better off trusting each other.

As the anachronistic Hemingway quote goes, “The way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.” Put more simply, trust begets trust. It’s true for Willy Wonka, who changes the hearts and minds of Noodle and their fellow inn escapees, and I think it’s true for all of us. Trust is essential, but it is only sustained if we take the risk of putting it in others, no matter the potential costs.

And as it corrodes, it becomes increasingly urgent to revive it. With distrust reaching a critical mass, to borrow an Oppenheimer-ism, I think many are seeing the importance of revitalizing trust. The Atlantic last week published “We’ve Been Thinking About America’s Trust Collapse All Wrong,” in which author Jedediah Britton-Purdy broke down the implications of deteriorating trust for the stability of our democracy. “Cultivating strong mistrust is a way of giving up on others,” Britton-Purdy wrote. “I wonder whether we appreciate what we are at risk of giving up.” The brilliant economic writer Kyla Scanlon, in her 2024 outlook, deemed “trust” the word of 2024, because it is “the most valuable commodity in the age-of-everything.” When the information we take in is increasingly algorithmically defined, perhaps the way to stand out in the marketplace of ideas is to offer people something they can really believe in.

Whether it is in the context of our tenuous democracy or our incessant media and entertainment ecosystem, though, trust is not a commodity that should be given unconditionally. As the losses and victories of 2023’s best films show, trust carries risk. And because it carries risk it must be earned, not given. I don’t know whether the rapidly changing ways we are experiencing the world will renew our impulse to trust one another or completely eradicate it. But I do know that if I don’t make an effort to give it where it is earned, even when this vulnerability feels perilous, that I’ll never get it back in return. My energy for 2024 is to rely on the kindness of strangers, because if we don’t see this as the way of the world, we will never be able to make it so.

2023 in review: The peril and promise of trusting other people