Cinema can be a great escape, and blockbusters like Star Wars and plenty of the better superhero movies out there offer just that. You’ve also got easy-to-watch comedies, often of the romantic sort, and comfort watches are great. No one is denying that. But film, as a medium, isn’t just about the good times and putting forth good vibes, because plenty of great movies do anything but inspire good feelings.
The following movies are all among the heaviest of the last half-decade, and are outlined below without details that are too specific, plot-wise, though knowing a movie is heavy-going in advance can sometimes hint at things that’ll happen, you know? Also, at the time of writing, 2021 was five years ago, so that’s the furthest back a movie could’ve been released if it’s to be included here.
10
‘Vortex’ (2021)
Vortex is simple, at least narratively. It’s about an elderly couple facing health concerns, and how such things progressively make both their lives harder. One has a heart condition, and then he finds his wife is struggling with helping him, since her memory is starting to go, and there is something to be said about how they still care for each other, but overall, things are deteriorating throughout.
And watching Vortex is to see things fall apart a little more, scene by scene. It’s uncompromising, albeit in a gentler way compared to how in-your-face and alarming content-wise Gaspar Noé’s other movies are. Also, while the narrative is simple, the filmmaking and editing here aren’t, seeing as Vortex uses split screen and some other creative choices really effectively, and in ways that end up being rather devastating, too.
9
‘The Long Walk’ (2025)
In The Long Walk, there are a bunch of teenage boys who have to walk for – you guessed it – a long time. They live in a dystopian society where the titular event is held yearly, and it’s basically the ultimate endurance contest. Every participant has to stay on their feet while maintaining a steady pace, and failure to do so leads to instant death.
It was directed by Francis Lawrence, who’s best known for helming many of the Hunger Games movies, but The Long Walk is a considerably more downbeat affair than even those, and might well give Battle Royale a run for its money depression-wise (as far as these dystopian competition movies go). The Long Walk more than does justice to its source material, which is saying quite a bit, considering The Long Walk is up there among Stephen King’s best works (and it is the best novel he wrote under his Richard Bachman pseudonym).
8
‘The Brutalist’ (2024)
With The Brutalist, you’re made to feel bad for a long time, since the movie runs for over three and a half hours. There is that built-in intermission to give you some relief from all the misery, but that only goes so far. Essentially, it’s a movie about an architect coming to live in the U.S. after leaving Europe, pursuing that whole American dream thing and slowly realizing it’s more of a fantasy than a dream that could technically come true (but doesn’t).
The Brutalist is an impressive and ambitious film, just one you have to be ready for, and possibly in a certain mood to watch.
You can’t really describe the things that happen specifically in The Brutalist while keeping the language PG, and also, going into detail would involve spelling out a lot that happens toward the end of the movie’s (again, long) runtime. It’s best experienced for yourself, especially because it is an impressive and ambitious film, more just one you have to be ready for, and possibly in a certain mood to watch in the first place.
7
‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)
In a way, Oppenheimer is a World War II movie that doesn’t showcase any combat or fighting, but still manages to explore the toll of the war, particularly regarding the development – and deployment – of the atomic bomb. From there, it also tackles the idea of future warfare being fought with such devastating weapons, and that means it taps into a very real and ongoing anxiety, even if all the events depicted in the movie technically happened decades ago. History is still unfolding and all, which is a weirdly unsettling thing to think about.
Most other Christopher Nolan movies are largely pieces of entertainment, and sure, Oppenheimer still delivers some spectacle (and it’s not a boring watch, by any means), but things are darker than most Nolan movies here. You’re meant to feel unnerved throughout much of the film, and then particularly anxious after it concludes, and on those fronts, Oppenheimer is devastatingly effective.
6
‘Eddington’ (2025)
Eddington was a bit of a change of pace for Ari Aster, who’d largely been known for his horror movies pre-2025, even if Beau Is Afraid drifted away from horror to some extent (not entirely). Also, Eddington is kind of horrific, and certainly tense at times, but it’s also a darkly comedic neo-Western that is very specifically (kind of uncomfortably so) about the early stages of the COVID pandemic.
That makes it a bit of a hard sell, because you have to revisit a time in history that is barely history, and Eddington wants you to relive the discomfort and confusion of it all. Also, the entire thing is remarkably cynical, both in ways you’d expect (it is an Ari Aster film, after all) and in a few unexpected ways, too. Nothing ever really feels secure or like a sure thing here, and it’s possibly the darkest wide-release comedy in recent memory, too.
5
‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (2022)
92 years before All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), there was an early sound film adaptation of the same source material, and it still ranks among the heaviest-going Best Picture winners in Oscar history. The story here is one of the definitive anti-war ones, since it’s about young people feeling excitement about taking part in World War I, but then finding the reality of being a soldier is far removed from what was expected.
The 1930 version is still devastating, of course, and would’ve been particularly so for its time, but the 2022 adaptation ups the intensity and level of violence considerably, making World War I look suitably grim, savage, and tragic. You know what you’re in for, to some extent, sitting down to watch another movie based on All Quiet on the Western Front, but still, there are new ways the knife is twisted here, so to speak, found by this particular film.
4
‘Sirāt’ (2025)
Sirāt has some dread early on, and the premise involves a father desperately searching for a missing daughter, so it’s never really an easy watch, but it does get more horrifying as it progresses. In more ways than one, it’s about getting lost and running out of any kind of hope to cling onto, and it’s a distressingly efficient film at getting a little grimmer with just about every passing moment.
Saying anything more about Sirāt would be saying too much, especially because it’s even more recent a release than the other movies being mentioned here, and there is also quite a lot that can be ruined about it, generally speaking. It’s an engrossing watch, and certainly hypnotic, but you have to be relatively prepared for some inevitable unpleasantness.
3
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ (2023)
There is organized crime (or a series of crimes) at the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon, but it’s not about organized crime in, like, a gangster film way, like some of Martin Scorsese’s other crime movies. It’s a different beast, and an intentionally more patiently paced one, being about a series of murders carried out to obtain oil-rich land in Oklahoma during the 1920s.
So it’s not a thriller necessarily, but it is extremely intense throughout, and the way the film centers on the perpetrators of such crimes kind of provides an uncomfortable amount of insight into both why they did such things and how they were able to justify their crimes to themselves. Killers of the Flower Moon was not the only film of 2023 to explore the banality of evil, by any means, since that same year, there was also…
2
‘The Zone of Interest’ (2023)
…The Zone of Interest. This one’s set during World War II, but is thematically very much in line with Killers of the Flower Moon and, like that film, things are shown from the perspective of the side you don’t usually see things from. With The Zone of Interest, the central characters live just outside Auschwitz, as they’re members of Rudolf Höss, who was the commandant of the concentration camp.
Very purposefully, nothing is seen inside the camp itself, but a lot of things are heard, and you do feel the horror of the situation while getting disquieting insight into how people could excuse/ignore such terrible acts. It’s something that the emotionally harrowing documentary Shoah also explores at some points, with both that and The Zone of Interest being incredible films that are also, to an extent, quite hard to recommend, just because of how heavy they are (well, how heavy they arguably need to be).
1
‘Blonde’ (2022)
Calling a movie that’s only a few years old one of the heaviest of the past few decades might be risky, since sometimes, what’s harrowing one day might not be, to such a great extent, a great deal of time later. But with Blonde, it’s unlikely that it’ll ever be anything close to an easy watch. This film’s almost three hours long, and is a borderline-horror movie about Marilyn Monroe. Kind of.
It’s not really a biopic, and its source material was never really focused on being super historically accurate, either. It uses Monroe’s life to paint a picture of a predatory film industry, and maybe just a predatory/misogynistic world, in general. What it has to say is important, and Blonde (2022) gets the message across in an arguably even stronger way than the Joyce Carol Oates novel it’s based on, but it is also, by design, one of the most difficult films out there to get through.
