Far Out Magazine explores how Joy Division's bleak final album, Closer, inspired the title and tone of Patrick Marber's 1997 play of the same name, which was later adapted into the 2004 film Closer, directed by Mike Nichols. Marber revealed that he borrowed the title from the band after abandoning a working title, "An Obituary for Alice Ayres," showing how the post-punk group's legacy stretched well beyond music into a critically acclaimed piece of cinema about the cruelty of modern relationships.

Joy Division formed in 1976 and recorded Closer shortly before singer Ian Curtis took his own life at 23 in 1980, with the album released two months later as a stark, despairing meditation on isolation and guilt. The film Closer, starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, charts the entangled, deceitful relationships of four Londoners, and Marber has said the album's nihilistic spirit, rather than any narrative detail, shaped his writing.