Why does my husband’s tía abuela in Santiago watch the same Chilean drama from the late 1980s three or four times a year, every year, when streaming has put roughly the entire catalog of human filmmaking in her living room? She has tried newer things. She likes some of them. She still comes back, predictably, to the same film, sometimes within weeks of having just finished it.
For a long time I assumed this was a kind of stubbornness, or just the path of least resistance. Newer things take energy. Familiar things don’t. The closer I have looked, though, both at her and at the research on what nostalgia actually does for people, the more I think we have been misreading the rewatch. It is not laziness. It is, at her age, a quiet form of maintenance.
And once you start noticing it, you see it in a lot of older people. The same handful of films through the year. The same two or three books pulled off the shelf and re-read. The same songs on the radio every Sunday morning. Younger people often read this as a closed mind. It might be the opposite. It might be a mind that has gotten very good, very late, at choosing exactly what it wants to spend an hour on.
So what is the familiar actually doing?
Nostalgia researchers Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, who have spent the last two decades studying what nostalgic experience does to people, have built a substantial case that nostalgia is not a soft sentimental indulgence. In a 2025 review of fifteen-plus years of work in Emotion Review, they describe nostalgia as “an invigorating psychological resource that engenders hope and meaning” rather than the medical condition it was once considered to be. The act of revisiting something emotionally rich from the past, in their framing, increases feelings of social connectedness, meaning in life, and self-continuity. A rewatched film is, in this sense, a pretty efficient delivery system for all three.
Why might this do more work after a certain age?
A 2022 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, focused specifically on healthy aging, argued that nostalgia is particularly useful in later life because it helps maintain a coherent sense of self across decades. Older adults are doing something younger people don’t have to do as much yet: actively holding together a long, layered life. The twenty-five-year-old version of them, the forty-year-old version, the sixty-year-old version. A familiar film is a kind of small private museum where all of those versions can sit in the same room for ninety minutes.
My husband’s grandmother’s sister is not, when she watches that 1980s drama again, just enjoying the plot. She is briefly sitting in the apartment she lived in when she first saw it. She is briefly someone’s younger wife. She is briefly a mother of small children. None of those versions of her have gone away. They are just usually offstage. The rewatch brings them back into the room. The familiar isn’t lazy. It is load-bearing. A new film cannot do that for her, because she didn’t live through her twenties or thirties or fifties with it. Self-continuity doesn’t come from material she met yesterday.
What does the new actually fail to do?
New films are wonderful. They also ask you to do work. You have to learn the characters, hold their relationships in your head, decide whether to trust the storyteller, build the emotional logic of the world from scratch. Younger viewers have the cognitive bandwidth and the curiosity for that on a regular weeknight. A seventy-year-old who has spent forty years building and managing a household may not always have that bandwidth spare in the evening, and may also not want to spend it. The familiar film is a thing she has already done the work for. What she gets to do this time is feel.
I notice this in myself already, at thirty-something. Some evenings, after the baby is asleep and the kitchen is almost-clean, I do not want a new prestige drama about morally complicated people doing morally complicated things. I want the first season of a comedy I have seen six times, because I know where the laughs are and I know everyone gets out of the episode okay. That is a small version of the same impulse. Multiply it by forty more years of having lived inside the world you’re trying to relax at the end of, and you start to see why the same drama in the same DVD case on the same shelf does not look ridiculous to anyone in their seventies.
So is it just comfort?
It’s easy to call it that, but I think it sells the act short. Comfort is what a blanket gives you. The rewatched film gives a person something more specific. It gives them the experience of being met by their own life, with the volume turned down on whatever is currently demanding. It’s closer to maintenance than to indulgence. The research on nostalgia suggests that what looks like sitting still is doing real psychological work in the background, the same way a good night of sleep does work that doesn’t show up on the camera but matters in the morning.
I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not arguing that you should never watch anything new again. If your relationship with the past has tipped from comforting into something heavier (repeatedly hiding inside one film, refusing to engage with the present, feeling unable to come back) please talk to someone you trust about it. That isn’t what this article is describing. What this article is describing is the older person who quietly puts on the same film while they fold the laundry, smiles in the same places, and looks slightly lighter when it is over.
They are not wasting time. They are doing something they already know is good for them, in a way they’ve probably stopped trying to justify out loud.
