If you often read about heavy and depressing movies, there might not be too many surprises below. Such films are intriguing and, if you’re in the right mood, they can also be incredibly compelling, not to mention perhaps even cathartic. In a sense, despairing movies can serve the same function as scary ones, because a great horror movie is a safe way to experience and process fear, and then a horrifically sad movie is a way to grapple with intense emotions without directly hurting yourself emotionally.
To keep things a little less intense, there aren’t any documentaries below, but some of these heavy-going movies are based on bleak true stories, or sometimes feel uncomfortably realistic. This is also a ranking that focuses just on movies from the past half-century, so, apologies to the likes of The Godfather Part II, The Human Condition, and The Great Silence, but you’re all too old, because you all came out before 1976.
10
‘The Deer Hunter’ (1978)
Of all the movies to have won Best Picture at the Oscars, The Deer Hunter is certainly up there among the saddest. It’s about the Vietnam War, in a way, even if much of it doesn’t take place in Vietnam. A good chunk of the movie is spent on American men dealing with the fact that they’re about to be sent overseas, and then another chunk of the movie explores what happens to them after their time spent fighting.
It’s not a perfect movie, but The Deer Hunter is very much an epic that does most things right, so you have a lot of good here alongside some imperfections. Still, it was a vital Vietnam War movie, and it still feels like one of the best about the U.S. experience of fighting in that conflict, all the while also being a very effective anti-war movie more generally speaking.
9
‘Requiem for a Dream’ (2000)
Requiem for a Dream is about four people who all have their lives changed by drugs, in one way or another. That feels like a simple way to describe the film, but at the same time, Requiem for a Dream really isn’t complicated in terms of what it’s going for narratively and thematically. The filmmaking, on the other hand, is pretty complex, because very little felt, looked, and sounded like this, back in 2000.
Nowadays, the flashiness might be a bit distracting, and also, there’s an argument to be made that Requiem for a Dream is almost accidentally comedic in how over-the-top it gets, yet it always comes back to this being an effective “worst case scenario” exploration of what addiction can do. If you treat it like an almost theatrical and oftentimes nightmarish/feverish film, rather than a grounded/realistic drama, then it mostly works, and proves pretty emotionally brutal, too.
8
‘Blonde’ (2022)
Some people really don’t like Blonde very much, but it’s here not so much because of its quality, and more because of its content. It is a dark and despairing movie that’s about Marilyn Monroe, to some extent, but also not really a biopic, since it wants to explore misogyny, abuse, and all sorts of other terrible things within the film industry, using Monroe and things from her life (or inspired by her life) to explore such disturbing territory.
There’s something potentially troubling about using a real-life person to tackle those things, but Blonde is sympathetic to Monroe and what she went through, and the things it wants to discuss are still relevant in the 21st century (not relegated to Hollywood just in the 1950s and ‘60s, by any means). Blonde is also confronting for a very long time, since it’s not far off three hours in length, and very little of it comes even remotely close to feeling easy to watch.
7
‘Ran’ (1985)
Ran is, at the very least, a gorgeous-looking movie throughout its whole runtime, so even if you feel pretty miserable by the end of it all, at least your eyes will have gotten something nice to experience (well, outside at least one very violent battle sequence that’s pretty nightmarish to witness). It’s a movie about a succession crisis, in effect, with the sons of an aging warlord disagreeing on the decision he makes early on, which eventually leads to all-out warfare.
It ends incredibly well, too, not necessarily because it’s surprising what happens, but because of the way it happens, and what you end up feeling at the end of it all. Ran is seriously impressive stuff in just about every way, and unlike a few soon-to-be-mentioned movies that are great but hard to watch, Ran is sometimes hard to watch, but also done in a way that makes it not as difficult to recommend, even with all the heaviness it’s got.
6
‘The Irishman’ (2019)
You get a little by way of excitement and even some dark comedy in The Irishman, but not as much as a fair few other gangster movies, including Goodfellas, which The Irishman feels a little like a spiritual sequel to. It’s about a man who was once a killer-for-hire for the mob, and the movie starts with him in old age, looking back on what he did when he was younger (and how he might’ve played a part in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa).
It’s a remarkable gangster film, and one that manages to find a new and interesting angle to explore this well-worn genre. The genre is certainly well-worn territory for Martin Scorsese, but he doesn’t repeat himself or play the hits here, by any means, and The Irishman stands as one of his best (yes, really) movies, and also undoubtedly one of his heaviest.
5
‘The Seventh Continent’ (1989)
The Seventh Continent might be the most obscure movie here, so that makes it extra worthy of not being spoiled, but it’s also a Michael Haneke film, and his work is just about always heavy-going. Even if you’ve seen Amour, Funny Games (both versions), and The Piano Teacher, you still might not be entirely prepared for what The Seventh Continent has in store for you.
It unfolds very slowly, but proves excellent at building up dread and an odd sort of suspense (just not the fun kind that you often get in thrillers). It’s about a family dealing with ordinary problems, but they’re also hiding a secret plan, and more and more, you realize something is wrong, or is about to go very wrong. And it’s unbearable. It’s good, and very well-made in the sense that it’s so effectively uncomfortable, but dang is it a rough watch.
4
‘Come and See’ (1985)
It’s odd, in a way, how Come and See manages to feel brutally realistic while also having a certain surreal quality, but maybe that comes down to the surreal stuff feeling like it represents the main character’s gradual psychological breakdown. He’s a young boy who feels motivated to fall in with a group of resistance fighters during the Second World War, but the whole group ends up being entirely out of their depth, fighting German forces in Belarus.
Come and See feels a little off right from the start, and then it slowly gets more intense, with each scene feeling a little closer to a nightmare, so by the end, an anti-war movie has pretty much become a horror film. It’s pretty close to unbearable, yet arguably sort of has to be, given what it wants to say about World War II, and also warfare more broadly.
3
‘Dancer in the Dark’ (2000)
Meanness and cynicism aren’t rare, when you’re looking over the filmography of Lars von Trier, though Dancer in the Dark is brutal even by his standards. It’s about a single mother who finds solace in musicals and a purpose in life because of her son, but she also works a difficult job and finds herself going blind, which makes her desperate to do whatever she can to prevent her son from also one day going blind.
Dancer in the Dark proves willing to sucker punch you, at a point, and then get increasingly more despairing during its second half.
There are musical numbers, but they’re all done as an escape from the real world, so even if some of the songs sound joyful, they all come about because of sadness. And that’s before getting into the really heavy stuff in Dancer in the Dark, because it proves willing to sucker punch you, at a point, and then get increasingly more despairing during its second half. It’s an amazing movie, but almost aggressively difficult to watch at points.
2
‘Grave of the Fireflies’ (1988)
Another unsurprising pick, and maybe even the most unsurprising pick, but here’s Grave of the Fireflies. It joins Come and See as one of those great movies you’ll probably only ever want to watch once and, also like that film, it’s set during the Second World War and has a focus on showing how young people were impacted by the conflict.
The two main characters in Grave of the Fireflies are a pair of siblings who have to survive the final stretch of the war, in Japan, having lost their mother and no longer having a place they can call home. It’s grueling and justifiably hopeless stuff, narratively speaking, with very little by way of relief or catharsis here. It’s a movie about struggle, and it’s all the more difficult to watch because the people struggling are so young.
1
‘Threads’ (1984)
Threads shows that no matter how bad you’d expect a nuclear war and subsequent apocalypse to be, it would actually probably be even worse, in reality. Now, hopefully, no one will ever know 100% how accurate Threads was, given the world would pretty much have to end before people could compare and contrast their new reality with what the film depicts, but for now, this feels startlingly believable.
In Threads, you get the lead-up to war, then a quick series of attacks that don’t take long to decimate the planet, and then a slow, drawn-out second half or so that depicts what remains of the human race eventually dying out. How it all looks and feels so convincing, despite its age and what doesn’t look like a huge budget, by any means, is staggering to behold. So, on that front, Threads is amazing, but it’s also the rare kind of amazing movie that’s all-but-impossible to recommend to most.
Threads
- Release Date
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September 23, 1984
- Runtime
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112 Minutes
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Karen Meagher
Ruth Beckett
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Reece Dinsdale
Jimmy Kemp