~ Great Soul-Crushing Films That Are Worth Your Time ~

[MysteRy]

Great Soul-Crushing Films That Are Worth Your Time




There are some films in this world whose main function serve to depress the viewer, to show-case the darkest, most lurid and sordid acts, the most desperate and strife-ridden lives. Why, for the love of God, would anyone wish to view these films? To remind ourselves that we are human.

It goes without saying that every film in this list is a beautiful piece of cinema. A director doesn’t set out to make a harrowing film such as these without caring deeply about its cinematography and editing. But these films also strike such a powerful emotional cord that they must be experienced, at least once.

These films show us how petty and inane our daily troubles truly are. They allow us to grieve for our fellow humans, the characters of these films, for their fates are truly hell on Earth. We watch these films so that we can appreciate everything for another year. To feel. To grow. To love. They serve as a cosmic reset button; suddenly anything bothering us is insignificant. These films heal.

When we describe a film as depressing, we don’t just mean ‘sad.’ ‘Soul-crushing’ is the preferred term. Films like Bambi, or Titanic, or even Inception, may be described as sad; they all feature deaths of loving, caring, innocent people, and the grief of those they leave behind.

These films aren’t just sad; they make you ashamed to admit you’re a human being. They feature the lowest of the low of our species, the sorrow and misery that can drive us to the most unconscionable acts. Topics like war, suicide, rape, neglect, mental illness, addiction, abuse, and extreme violence are the spinal cords of these films.

[MysteRy]

Happiness (1998, Todd Solondz)



What makes it depressing: Am I actually rooting for a pedophile?

This film represents a slight change-of-pace from the other films. There are some awkwardly funny moments in this one, like Philip Seymour Hoffman masturbating and using the result to glue pictures to his wall. The film’s end features an eleven-year-old boy masturbating on a hotel balcony. The family dog licks up the result as the boy cheerfully tells his family, “I finally came.”

But there’s a lot of darkness here as well. Hoffman sexually harasses his female neighbors on the phone. After being dumped, Jon Lovitz casts a spell against his date, driving her life into emotional chaos. A husband dissolves his forty-year-strong marriage for almost no reason. The most troubling character is the eleven-year-old’s father, played by Dylan Baker, who sexually molests many of his son’s classmates.

The most troubling scene is where Dylan Baker attempts to incapacitate his family and his son’s friend so that he can rape the friend. He spikes their ice cream, but the friend doesn’t like ice cream; he likes tuna. So the dad spikes a tuna sandwich, but the boy isn’t hungry. This entire scene is shown through Baker’s eyes as he disturbingly eyes the young boy’s body.

Solondz has cleverly, and disgus-tingly, tricked the viewer into rooting for the pedophile to succeed. Baker later admits to his son what he’s done. He admits to his son that he jerks-off while thinking of his son, in an extremely powerful and emotionally-crippling scene.

[MysteRy]

Kichiku dai Enkai (aka Banquet of the Beasts) (1997, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri)



What makes it depressing: The vile hatred associated with the gang world

In this little known Japanese cult film, a small-time gang’s leader gets sent to prison, where he promptly commits suicide. After hearing the news of this suicide, the surviving gang’s members disagree on how the new leadership should be handled. Factions grow, tensions thicken, and the result is a bloody battle for power in the woods, featuring beheadings, shotguns, and more violence and gore than most care to view.

Like many of these films, what makes this film so depressing is the way it is shot. It’s shot on the cheap, so the poor, grainy quality of the film makes it so much more real, as if a real gang actually filmed these acts of depraved violence on their own cheap cameras.

Two of the final members hold out in an abandoned, dilapidated house in the middle of the woods. Imagery such as the tattered, blood-stained Japanese flag that hangs behind their mattress adds to the decadence of it all, the devolution of Japanese culture.

[MysteRy]

The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer)



What makes it depressing: The growth of regret within an unrepentant killer.

This documentary focuses on a group of Indonesian gangsters and former death-squad leaders. A film crew comes to them with the idea to recreate some of their murders in the styles of classic American cinema. What gets documented are the gangsters methods and beliefs, their justifications for what they did. They mercilessly executed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of communists and Chinese immigrants, all of which to them was all necessary to protect their freedom and way of life.

The main person the film follows is named Anwar, and he is particularly frightening. He always wears very colorful shirts and a smile, even as he retells how exactly he slaughtered all those people, the exact locations of the bodies, the effectiveness of different weapons. He shows no remorse; in fact, he shows enthusiasm toward the prospect of recreating his favorite murders from his past.
Seeing just how indoctrinated really everyone in the film is, regarding the necessity of these government-sponsored gangsters who harass and shake-down their citizens, is truly unsettling. You would hope that in the 21st century, years after the murders these monsters perpetrated, that there would be more remorse. But no; just no.

There are hints at remorse. Anwar has horrible dreams, others regularly visit therapists. But it is only after filming a recreation, one in which Anwar plays a victim, that he gains some empathy for his victims. Anwar then returns to the same rooftop where so many of his murders occurred, and he dry-heaves, sick to his stomach over what he did.

Watching this scene, it feels like watching a human being grow a soul, and it is beyond powerful. But even this moment of catharsis does not negate the atrocities that occurred, and the guilt that Anwar and his fellow gangsters must take to their graves.

[MysteRy]

Leaving Las Vegas (1995, Mike Figgis)



What makes it depressing: The alcoholic antics of a man who has given up.

In his Oscar winning performance, Nicolas Cage drinks himself to death. He’s lost his job, his marriage, and now he’s willing to lose his life in the most slow, agonizing way he can. When he drinks, he’s numb to his actions, but when he wakes up he’s vomiting, badly hungover and shaking violently, so much so that he can barely speak before running to the liquor cabinet.

He hires a prostitute, played by Elisabeth Shue, to keep him company, so long as she promises to never make him quit drinking. She has her own problems, naturally, but they seem to fade away in light of Cage’s desperation. Their interaction does provide some lightheartedness to the film, but those moments only serve to temporarily subdue the nature of Cage’s mission. He has had enough with life, and wants to end it in his own unique way, and there’s not a damn thing anyone will do to stop him. No chance of redemption or starting over. No catharsis. Just liver disease and alcohol poisoning.

[MysteRy]

Lilya 4-Ever (2002, Lukas Moodysson)



What makes it depressing: Murphy’s Law. Everything will go wrong.

The movie starts of happy. Lilya, a 16-year-old Estonian girl, is planning to move to America with her mother. At the last moment, her mother decides instead to leave her behind for now and bring her to America later. Lilya is devastated. Then Lilya’s landlord kicks her out of her mother’s old apartment and into a tiny one where hardly anything works.

Her teachers treat her like a failure. Local boys treat her like a slut. Her mother later disowns her as a guardian. She has one true friend, a young boy named Volodja.
Things seem like they’re about to turn around when she falls for a boy who wants to bring her to Sweden, to live and work there.

When she arrives in Sweden, she is locked in her apartment and thrown into sexual slavery, forced to sleep with a different john every night. The only time she can escape this hell is when she dreams of seeing Volodja again in heaven—he swallowed a bottle of pills back in Estonia after Lilya left him behind. She wants these dreams to continue; they’re the only time she’s happy. So she manages to escape from her locked apartment, runs to a nearby bridge and jumps. Now she can play basketball all day long with Volodja in heaven.

No one anywhere in Lilya’s live cared for her. Her mother neglected her, the community spat on her, her boyfriend sold her as a slave. No one cared in any meaningful way if she was alive or dead. The only person who did was Volodja, and Lilya abandoned him, realizing she had done so only too late. Lilya was just another poor child from a poor country that no one gave a shit about.

[MysteRy]

Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noe)



What makes it depressing: The name says it all. There is nothing we can do.

The narrative, told backwards through time, tells of a young woman who, after a party with her boyfriend and ex, gets brutally raped and murdered—perhaps the most emotionally devastating rape scene ever filmed. The boyfriend stalks Paris’s seediest underground clubs searching for the killer, yet another act of revenge. Eventually he and the ex are hauled off to jail after pancaking a man’s face with a fire extinguisher while, unbeknownst to them, the true rapist looks on. The young woman had earlier that day learned that she was pregnant.

The expression “le temps detruit tout,” (time destroys all), serves as a theme throughout the film. There isn’t one mistake from one individual that destroys anything. It’s just the progression of time. From the hardest of deterministic stances, there is no free will that can save mankind from its savagery, its knee-jerk rage, its self-inflicted destruction.

Noe includes dizzying camera swerves, rapid-fire edits, and guttural subconscious noise to further disorientate the viewers, as if the backwards travel of time, abhorrent violence, and denial of conscious thought are not disorientating enough. The rape scene is particularly depressing. Monica Bellucci is assaulted on the floor of an underground walkway. She reaches out, toward the camera, towards the viewer. Everything in your body wants to reach into the screen and help her, but you can’t. These actions are irreversible; there is nothing anyone can do.

[MysteRy]

A Serbian Film (2010, Srdjan Spasojevic)



What makes it depressing: The extreme perversity that we are capable of.

Milos is a retired porn star, now living the life of a father, with a suburban wife and young child. One day, Milos is giving a very lucrative offer, by a more-shady-than-usual porn producer, to do one final film. For inspiration, the producers inject Milos with a drug that makes him violently sexually aggressive. The perversities worsen exponentially as the films winds on, including acts such as Milos chopping a woman’s head off while having sex with her, and other acts for which the simple words do not come close to describing their horror.

If you’ve seen the film, then you know just how abhorrent things become, and if you’re human those images and acts portrayed will never leave you. But this film is much more that pure violence and ‘torture-porn.’ Milos is a good man, a good father. His only flaw is his questionable former career. He takes the job wanting only to provide for his family. Perhaps only in the darkest corner of his imagina-tion does he imagine this job would in fact destroy his family, resulting in their inevitable suicides.

Much like the case of Oh Dae-Su, a common, inherently normal desire, to provide for you and yours, leads to what after-the-fact seems an inescapable end, due to the encompassing darkness—the envy, rage and violence—that lurks within us all.

[MysteRy]

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini)



What makes it depressing: The pure decadence of humanity.

The film is based on the infamous novel of the Marquis de Sade, from whose name the term ‘sadist’ arises. Considering this film, that etymological bit of trivia should be obvious. The basic plot is that a wealthy group of Italian fascists keep captive a group of teenagers and subject them to various atrocities, such as rape, forced coprophagia, and torture. Again, it’s the presentation, not the mere content, which makes this film so devastating.

The film stands as a glaring, if unsubtle, rebuke of the elite class, and the decadence of fascism. These fascists have the money and influence to live life however they wish. However, they decide to use their economic status to life out their most base and degrading fantasies upon the most poor and vulnerable. They play songs and tell cheerful stories about being sodomized by their fathers at age nine.

The fact that these men and women committing these atrocities are the most wealthy and distinguished members of their society, subtly (and brilliantly, on Pasolini’s part) communicates that to be where they are, celebrating in their appalling excesses, is the goal of society; that to acquire wealth and influence is commensurate to acquiring the desire for the most ribald and sadistic pleasures known to humanity. Why bother with caviar when the truer delicacy is human feces?

[MysteRy]

Martyrs (2008, Pascal Laugier)



What makes it depressing: The depth to which we will sink in the name of answers.

Martyrs, too, is one of the most violent films on the planet. But like A Serbian Film, the manner of the violence, its nature and motivations, sets it apart from other gore-fests, such as Hostel. The main perpetrator of the extreme violence is a religious cult who tortures young women in a variety of ways, both physical and psychological. Their goal in doing so is to learn about the after-life; they believe their victims can become martyrs, that their souls can enter the after-life while their bodies are still in this life, and that they can relate what they see on the other side.

The film begins with an escapee of the cult returning to murder her torturers, yet another example of revenge leading to destruction. There is the famous proverb, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Her inability to cope with her trauma, to seek proper help for her post-traumatic psychosis, leads to her ill-advised return to the place of her torment, and eventually her death.

The cult members do not see themselves as sadists. They would likely describe themselves as researchers, examining, through what they see as the best methodology, the nature of the after-life. But is that knowledge really worth the extreme suffering you are inflicting? The ends clearly justify the means to these people; human ethics rank so far below the concerns of knowledge that they’re not even on the scale.

Learning is paramount, and to hell with human decency. The even more disturbing and subtle notion, that the cultists could be the true martyrs, sacrificing their resources in search of this answer, is too horrible even to fathom. And when they get that answer, can the human mind really handle it? Or will it destroy us.

[MysteRy]

The Mist (2007, Frank Darabont)



What makes it depressing: The anthropological view of humanity’s darker side.

Based on a Stephen King story, a group of people from a small town in Maine (where else?) are held up inside a grocery store by a strange, heavy mist. There’s clearly something dangerous about it; a man runs into the store bleeding, screaming “There’s something in the mist!” Eventually strange, alien creatures appear out of the mist and attack everyone in the store. But what’s truly terrifying, is the behavior of the people in the store.

Marcia Gay Harden gives a fanatical performance as Mrs. Carmody, a God-fearing Christian who believes this is the end times, that Satan has sent these demons to Earth to prey on sinners. Over the course of the film she convinces nearly the entire store of this truth, and starts to demand sacrifices to appease the beasts and cleanse the wicked. This is portrayed not as an anomaly of an insane extremist, but as something that commonly happens to frightened humans.

“As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?” “—My God, David, we’re a civilized society. —Sure, as long as the machines are working and you can dial 911. But you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them–no more rules.” These are just two quotes from the film that explain these insane behaviors as normal, human interactions in the face of terror.

The ending, however, is the hardest of all. After a handful of people escape, they run into a creature as tall as the sky, with eight gigantic legs, uncountable tentacles, and God knows what other formidable adaptations designed to kill. It is clear that this creature signals the end of the line. David, played wonderfully by Thomas Jane, decides to ease his friends’, and his son’s, suffering by executing them.

Little did he know the military was on its way, with protection and medicine. This unnecessary tragedy, acted out because of an inability to cope with apparent hopelessness, wouldn’t have even been discussed if they had waited only a few minutes. But the impetuousness of our species, our demand for immediate and irrevocable safety, leads us to act dramatically, to ease our pain prematurely rather than fight just a little bit longer.

[MysteRy]

The Girl Next Door (2007, Gregory M. Wilson)



What makes it depressing: The horrors of misogyny.

Meg is a young girl who comes, along with her disabled sister, to live with her aunt Ruth after her parents tragically pass away. Ruth, it would seem, must have been a victim of sexual abuse at some point, because her opinions of women are poor at best. Women, especially young women, in her eyes are little more than whores, vile succubi whose menstruation is a depravity, and whose sexuality is the source of all human shame and needs to never be encouraged or permitted.

These beliefs lead Ruth to treat Meg like she is lower than dirt. She is constantly teased, berated, and abused. Soon verbal attacks fall short, as she is held prisoner in the basement while Ruth’s sons, and several neighborhood boys, take turns sexually assaulting her.

Ruth is clearly among the most terrifying and despicable movie villains in history. The hate- filled words that she uses to torment innocent Meg are released with such apathy, and if young girls are so low that they aren’t even worth passionate hatred. The way she manipulates the young boys of the neighborhood into likewise hating Meg, seeing her as merely a hole, speaks to the influence adults have over children, and when that influence gets perverted, and hate gets taught, is can be monstrous.

Ruth, a woman herself, is nonchalantly helping to create a new generation of deep-seeded misogyny. Finally one of the young boys reports these events (the worst of which being the burning of Meg’s clitoris) to the police. Some faith in humanity is restored, but the battle has been lost, and hate has won.

[MysteRy]

Oldboy (2003, Chan-wook Park)



What makes it depressing: Inevitable, but incredibly human, destruction.

Oh Dae-su is an alcoholic, out being arrested on his daughter’s birthday. After being released by the police, he is abducted and locked away in a room for 15 years. The boredom, isolation, and lonely-ness become his entire life. He has nothing to do but imagine who put him there, imagine what he’ll do to them if he’s ever released. The anger and desire for revenge seethe until not much else is left.

Oh Dae-su is eventually released, and is told that he has 5 days to discover who did this to him and why, or he will be killed. It turns out that when he was in high school, he saw two of his classmates, a brother and sister, having sex. Oh Dae-su, perhaps inadvertently, spread rumors that the sister was pregnant with her brother’s child. The rumors became so persistent that even she believed she was pregnant, and committed suicide.

“Be it a grain of sand, or a rock, in water they sink alike,” is the proverb Woo-jin uses to justify his revenge, of imprisoning Oh Dae-su. Does a small, accidental rumor really deserve 15 years of bondage? But that’s not all; Oh Dae-su has been tricked, through hypnosis, into having an incestuous relationship with the daughter he abandoned.

Oh Dae-su is doomed from the start. For the rational man, it would have been sufficient to be freed. Leave the country; start a new life. But no one is that rational after fifteen years of imprisonment. Revenge and anger consume him. After being given his ultimatum, a side of him, whatever logical capacity he has left, knew that learning the truth would destroy him. But he must know. We seek the truth, we seek explanation, we seek revenge, even though these things we seek will be our ruin. That sense of inevitable destruction is what makes the film so difficult to stomach.

[MysteRy]

A Necessary Death (2008, Daniel Stamm)



What makes it depressing: Suicide, and its effects on the human heart.

Gilbert is a driven documentary filmmaker who places a want ad looking for the subject of his next film. He is looking to film the process of suicide, “from first conception to final act.” Along comes Matt, a man with an inoperable brain tumor, who wishes to end his life before the pain becomes unbearable. Matt befriends Gilbert, and the rest of the film crew, which makes it very difficult, impossible, really, for Gilbert and his crew not to interfere with Matt’s plans.

Matt falls for Valerie, the film’s sound editor, who happens to be Gilbert’s ex. Matt and Val begin dating, and Val convinces him not to go through with the suicide. Something of a love triangle begins between the three, resulting in Val ending up back in Gilbert’s arms, and Matt, devastated, decides to go through with the suicide after all. The camera shows Matt and Gilbert both go into a garage, the idea being that Gilbert will film Matt shooting himself. From outside the garage, we hear two gunshots instead of one.

In opposition to the other films on this list, the depression in this film comes not from apathy, but from reaching out to help. Spending that much time with Matt, the crew couldn’t help but like him, even fall in love with him. Gilbert says at one point “I wish we hadn’t become friends. It would have made the shoot much easier.”

Matt is so sweet and fun-loving (a great performance by actor Matthew Tilley) that we can’t help but want to help him. And from that help, that natural, compassionate compulsion to help, Matt was only made to suffer a bit more in his last weeks, and lead him to take another life with him.

[MysteRy]

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969, Sydney Pollack)



What makes it depressing: Life as a perilous endurance contest.

Jane Fonda, and many others, enters into a dance marathon contest during the Great Depression, hoping to earn $1500 after over a month of continuous dancing. Upon entering the contest, Gloria, played by Fonda, is already bitter, sniping at nearly everyone who speaks to her.

During the course of the marathon, one man suffers a stroke and dies, his partner loses her mind—she enters the shower, fully clothed, and stares at the shower head which distorts her face; the most captivating shot of the film—even a pregnant couple is desperate enough to enter the contest; it is the Depression after all.

The marathon serves as a metaphor for live itself during those awful 1930s. People were so impoverished and needy that they agreed to subject themselves to such physical and emotional duress over what even in 1969 must have seemed like not that much money. But that’s how life goes; you put up with all the little indignities, the attacks, stresses and pains, and then it’s mercifully over.

Upon learning from the organizer that the event is rigged—the winners get basically nothing after having to pay for a month’s worth of food and laundry—Gloria and her partner immediately drop out of the contest. Exhausted and depleted, Gloria and her partner Robert, a gentle and obliging man, lean against the boardwalk. Gloria asks Robert to shoot her in the head; she’s had enough with this useless existence. He agrees; after all, once a horse is too old or lame to be of use, they put them to bed with a pistol, don’t they?

That reasoning is so dreary, that a human being is no more valuable than a horse, that a person’s life is so expendable that it can just be extinguished once it has run its course. But isn’t it justified? Can you really blame someone for retiring from what had been a completely awful life? Is that so criminal?