Alongside films about artificial intelligence and algorithms, this year has brought human stories that offer a welcome reminder of what life in the city is really like.
A giant octopus attack! A towering inferno! An uprising of talking apes! Or perhaps a Scottish nanny in drag?
Over the past century, cinema has greatly exaggerated both the dangers and the pleasures of San Francisco. Yet few cities have served so effectively as a screen onto which America projects its hopes and fears. From the fortunes promised by the Gold Rush to the liberation of the hippie era, and from nightmares of crime to the perils of technology, San Francisco has hosted a remarkable range of stories. It has been both the utopian home of Starfleet Academy in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the paranoid setting of the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
As someone who has lived in San Francisco for 30 years, I can laugh at the nightmarish playground portrayed in David Fincher’s 1997 film The Game. I am less amused by John Schlesinger’s 1990 thriller Pacific Heights, which presents tenants’ rights as a kind of horror story.
I have watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo at the Castro Theatre almost every year. I have also joined audiences in singing along when the organist plays the title song from San Francisco, the 1936 film, and laughed with the crowd at Jimmy Stewart’s complaints about Coit Tower, the concrete landmark rising above Telegraph Hill.
Vertigo captures something essential about San Francisco: the way the past haunts the present. The spirit of Carlotta Valdes, a woman from the city’s Spanish colonial past, possesses Kim Novak’s character, whose immaculate hair and grey wardrobe belong unmistakably to the 1950s.
Another favourite, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 comedy What’s Up, Doc?, is both a charming postcard of the city, complete with spectacular views and car chases along its steep streets, and a sharp portrait of the free-spirited San Franciscan. Barbra Streisand’s character manages to turn a painfully dull musicology convention upside down.
These films portray a city that is mysterious, chaotic, freewheeling, beautiful and capable of laughing at itself. That is the San Francisco I know.
How San Francisco became synonymous with tech
I struggle, however, to understand how the rest of the country sees the city today. Apparently, San Francisco has become a dystopian playground for tech companies and robots, populated by people seemingly high on ketamine.
In Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), a formula developed in a San Francisco pharmaceutical laboratory enhances the intelligence of apes while unleashing a human pandemic. In The Invisible Man (2020), Elisabeth Moss is terrorised by a tech-savvy former boyfriend who uses an invisibility suit of his own invention. Last year’s M3GAN 2.0 brought back its android doll to save humanity in a San Francisco populated by tech billionaires, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Where is Barbra Streisand when you need her?
San Francisco has increasingly been conflated with Silicon Valley, which is technically part of the wider Bay Area but lies about an hour’s drive south of the city. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, about the Facebook whistle-blower and due out tomorrow, and Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Artificial (2026), about OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, promise more realistic portrayals of the technology world. But locals would not consider either a San Francisco movie. That is not simply because the stories are set elsewhere.
Although outsiders imagine a city overrun by tech executives and billionaires, these figures are not particularly visible in everyday life. Many ordinary tech workers spend their six-day working weeks boarding buses with darkened windows each morning for the journey to Silicon Valley. They return at night and are rarely seen around town. The tech titans are even less visible, and they do not participate in the city’s arts and cultural life as earlier generations of wealthy San Franciscans did.
It is frustrating to see films portray the city solely through the lens of its public image, which bears little resemblance to the reality of living here.
Human stories return to the screen
Fortunately, that seems to be changing. Olivia Wilde’s 2026 film The Invite opens with a recognisably traditional vision of San Francisco: cable cars, city views illuminated by the evening light and hills that are practically impossible to cycle up. Not an ape or a robot in sight.
The setting is essential to the story, a remake of the 2020 Spanish film Sentimental. An upper-middle-class couple, played by Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde, invite their more sexually liberated neighbours, played by Penélope Cruz and Ed Norton, to dinner. The evening upends the hosts’ own relationship. Even in 2026, San Francisco remains a place where sexual and political freedom can be both liberating and destructive.
Another film released this year, Josephine, feels even closer to the lived experience of the city. Perhaps that is because it was made by San Francisco native Beth de Araújo, who insisted on filming there.
The complex and disturbing story follows a young girl who witnesses a terrible crime. San Francisco is neither paradise nor hellscape; it is, in a sense, indifferent to her fate. Set in the Richmond District, where de Araújo grew up, the film avoids clichés and familiar media narratives while creating a distinctive atmosphere. Pylons emerge from the mist as foghorns sound ominously in the distance. The Golden Gate Bridge appears, but as locals often see it from below while visiting Fort Point. The city is presented from a child’s point of view.
As in Joe Talbot’s moving 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the tension beneath the city’s moody beauty comes not from technological menace or drug-fuelled chaos, but simply from the difficulty of sharing a world with other people.
These human stories are especially poignant because they unfold in a place so recently associated with technology. If humanity is heading towards a real-life showdown with machines, the mere existence of these films feels like a point in our favour.
Still, while I appreciate their realism, I am no more immune than other moviegoers to fantasy and excess. I know the hippie Edens and technological nightmares are distortions of reality, but I enjoy them all the same.
A city built on dreams and excess
Was it Sharon Stone’s dangerously seductive, murderous bisexual character driving along Route 1 in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) that first made me want to move to San Francisco? Or was it Kim Novak throwing herself into San Francisco Bay in Vertigo?
Why is the city so susceptible to projection, even among those of us who live here?
Perhaps San Francisco is the id to New York City’s superego. Perhaps it is America’s madwoman in the attic. The answer may lie in the mythology of its founding: a once-sleepy Spanish peninsula taken from the Ohlone people, suddenly overwhelmed by miners drawn by tales of gold.
Think San Francisco is expensive today? In 1850, a dozen eggs cost the equivalent of about $500 in the city and well over $1,000 in more remote gold-mining camps.
A century later, after the Second World War, sailors were dropped off in San Francisco and helped establish a gay community. The city has therefore long been a place of dreams and extraordinary fortunes, desire and nonconformity. It is frightening to the rest of the country, but alluring, too.
One day, an earthquake may bring the whole Gomorrah tumbling down. I’m sure they will make a movie about that, too.
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