Cross-media picks for Gus Van Sant fans — films, series, games and books in the same vein.
Fans of Gus Van Sant tend to seek out stories that refuse easy resolution — where young people are stranded by circumstance, moral choices carry real weight, and the camera holds steady on lives lived at the edge of belonging. These picks share that register: from Floating and The Living End to Narcissu and The Motherfucker With the Hat, the mood is stripped-back and honest, with characters whose loyalties and losses rarely lead anywhere clean.
Film
Blackrock
A teenager's paralysing silence after witnessing gang rape and murder puts moral complicity front and centre.
Film
The Last Boy Scout
A private detective and an ex-footballer dig into a stripper's murder and uncover deep corruption beneath Los Angeles.
Film
Under the Volcano
A single day of alcoholic dissolution in Mexico maps one British consul's irreversible self-destruction.
Film
Floating
Left behind while his peers leave for college, a young man cares for his disabled, alcoholic father, adrift and purposeless.
Film
How to Make a Killing
A chance accident drops two million euros on a bored mountain couple, unravelling their quiet monotony dangerously.
Film
The Living End
Two HIV-positive outcasts flee across America in a crime spree that is equal parts nihilism and tenderness.
Film
Tape
Three people in a motel room excavate a shared past, and old wounds refuse to stay buried.
Film
Highway
Two friends running from a Vegas thug head for Seattle, carrying a secret one of them won't share.
Series
No One Will Miss Us
Nineties high-school students running an illegal homework business find that popularity carries real consequences.
Series
Innocent Love
A young woman shunned by her whole town after her brother's arrest rebuilds her life under a crushing social stigma.
Series
The Guardian
A drug conviction forces a hotshot lawyer into community service, exposing a world he spent his career ignoring.
Series
Old Time Buddy
Two ambitious friends discover that fame divides what loyalty once held together.
Series
No. 6
A privileged teenager's one act of kindness unravels his safe life inside a polished, controlling city-state.
Series
LOVED ONE
A forensic drama that sits quietly with grief, tracing the love that outlasts the people who felt it.
Series
Devil's Kiss
Three small-town friends hit Tokyo and are consumed by debt, desire and manipulation that destroys their bond.
Series
Paradise
A shocking murder inside a wealthy enclave strips back the calm and reveals what power tries to hide.
Game
Blues and Bullets
A retired crime-fighter dragged back into a corrupt city's rot finds the fight is never truly over.
Game
Kara no Shoujo
A private investigator in 1950s Tokyo pursues a killer through cases that expose violence hidden under ordinary life.
Game
Lake
A woman leaves her big-city career to fill in for her father as a mail carrier in her quiet hometown.
Game
Made Man
A Vietnam veteran's path through organised crime shows loyalty and violence as twin sides of the same coin.
Game
Tender Loving Care
An interactive suspense story turns your own psychology into the mystery you must solve.
Game
We Know the Devil
Outcast teenagers at a religious camp face something far older and stranger than the rules they were given.
Game
Narcissu 1st & 2nd
A spare, devastating visual novel about terminally ill young people who cannot face dying where they are told to.
Game
Seen
A wordless, relentless game about pursuing light through a world that offers no guarantees of survival.
Book
The chill
A psychological study of female desire and the priorities women bring to love and intimate relationships.
Book
Iron cast
Two young women using illegal talents in a gangster's nightclub run from a society determined to erase them.
Book
The Motherfucker With the Hat
A man just out of prison tries to stay clean while addiction and old love pull him back under.
Book
Memory
An actor with catastrophic memory loss is abandoned mid-tour, forced to rebuild identity from almost nothing.
Book
Ghost night
A survivor returns to a remote island film set where history's violence refuses to stay in the past.
Book
Open secret
A clear-eyed account of Hollywood's shifting relationship with its gay community, tracing careers across decades.
Book
Homeboyz
A teenager navigates gang-ruled streets after his little sister is killed, searching for justice in a system that ignores him.
Book
אותו הים
A widower and his estranged family try to reassemble a life after loss, each from a different direction.
Start with Floating or The Living End — both follow young people on the edge of society drifting toward crisis. Tape is another sharp pick: three people, one motel room, and a shared past that won't stay buried.
The Motherfucker With the Hat captures addiction, loyalty and the impossible weight of staying clean. Homeboyz offers a raw look at grief and street violence after a teenager's little sister is killed in a drive-by shooting.
Narcissu 1st & 2nd is the closest match: a quiet, devastating visual novel about young people facing death on their own terms. We Know the Devil has a similar outsider intensity, following misfit teenagers through a week at a religious camp that goes very wrong.