Contemporary cognitivist theories of emotion, narrative, and genre tend to focus on character engagement, narrative content, and the cognitivist bases of film understanding. Noel Carroll argues, for example, that we can explain the puzzle of emotional convergence in film—that viewers typically respond in similar ways to particular movie scenes—by the “criterial prefocusing” of narrative cues that elicit and direct cinematically appropriate affective and emotional responses. Carl Plantinga, who emphasizes more than Carroll the interplay of cognitive, emotional, and generic factors, also foregrounds the role of character, action, and narrative content in his analyses of our affective and emotional engagement with film. One could object, however, that such approaches overlook the broader aesthetic and cinematic setting of narrative drama. It is not just character action and narrative content that elicit emotion but the whole repertoire of cinematic-aesthetic devices (lighting, composition, montage, rhythm, tempo, colour, texture, gesture, performance, music, and sound). Films do not simply present characters in discrete emotional states in order to convey narrative information. Rather, their aesthetic effect depends on the sensuous-affective background or encompassing “mood” against which our complex flow of emotional responsiveness becomes manifest; the background against which we are able to recognise, align, and ally ourselves with particular characters within specific narrative scenarios. To explore different variations in the aesthetics of mood I shall consider selected scenes from three generically distinctive films, Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), and Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003). My aim is to suggest the theoretical virtues of a phenomenologically richer perspective on the aesthetics of mood.