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By
Jeremy Urquhart
Published 2 minutes ago
Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He is also currently in the process of trying to become a Stephen King expert by reading all 2397 novels written by the author.
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Abandon all hope, ye who enter a cinema playing one of these movies. Or if you’ve got hope and you find it on a streaming service or DVD or something, uh, go ahead and abandon it in that situation, too. These movies are hopeless, but not in a technical sense, because they're all trying to be heavy and they succeed remarkably at that. They're hopeless in the sense that they inspire no feelings of hope, or anything very positive, really.
Some films, like The Shawshank Redemption or Rocky, might feature hardships and have their characters feel without hope at times, but perseverance is a theme of those two movies, and many other dramas, too. Perseverance might be found in the following films, but it’s either all for nothing, or too much bad stuff happens and hope/the will to go on is for nothing. If you want something feel-bad and despairing, these movies have got your back. Or they're willing to stab you in the back like, multiple times, and then laugh at you as you collapse to the ground, bleeding out. It depends on your point of view.
10 'Angst' (1983)
Erwin Leder as the Psychopath hiding around a corner in AngstImage via Les Films Jacques Leitienne
The appropriately named Angst is an absolute nightmare, and mostly in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t seen the film itself, which is another problem because you probably don’t want to see it. On paper, it’s just about a serial killer who eventually targets a family, and it’s got more of a premise than an actual story, so trying to explain it might make it sound stretched out or kind of boring.
And it’s also the kind of thing that’s been done before, so you'd probably ask, “What’s the point?” or “What makes it so bad?” But it is. Angst is one of the most disturbing movies ever made, without a doubt, because it’s uncompromising and filmed in a way that makes it feel like a nightmare, or a bad trip, or both. It’s relentlessly confronting, and the level of despair is both palpable and crushing.
9 'Dancer in the Dark' (2000)
Catherine Deneuve holding Bjork's face while she smiles in Dancer in the DarkImage by Constantin Film
Dancer in the Dark is a bleak crime drama and a musical at the same time, and it aims to make you feel a little sad for the first hour or so, and then absolutely drown you in melancholy for the rest of the runtime. That’s to say that there’s something of an unexpected development here, so to keep things vague, it’s about a single mother who has a lot of problems she’s dealing with, and then a new one, suddenly, that’s even more dramatic.
Of all the musicals ever made, Dancer in the Dark has a well-earned reputation for being one of the bleakest and most emotionally intense. It’s remarkable, and a highlight of Lars von Trier’s filmography for sure, but it’s only really recommendable to people who are sufficiently readied – and at least somewhat prepared – for a big old downer.
8 'Blonde' (2022)
Ana de Armas, looking sad, as Marilyn Monroe in BlondeImage via Netflix
If you go into Blonde hoping for a Marilyn Monroe biopic, you'll probably be disappointed, because that’s not really what this is. The film is instead something that uses Monroe to explore an issue inherent to the film industry (and other areas, really), regarding how people are used, exploited, and have their lives destroyed by more powerful individuals. It’s a story that has to be told, but using Monroe specifically to tell it might be a bit much for some.
So, in that sense, the controversy around Blonde is understandable, but as something that sheds light on abuse and predatory behavior within purportedly professional spaces, it’s bold and maybe even necessary. If you're offended by it, you won’t have fun, and if you get what it’s going for and appreciate it for that, you also won’t have fun. Everyone will come away from this feeling bad, but the divide comes from people disagreeing on what the film was going for, and the way it delivered whatever that was.
7 'Harakiri' (1962)
Tatsuya Nakadai in the duel scene from Harakiri (1962)Image via Shochiku
In Harakiri, the main character states he wishes to take his own life in a suicide ritual early on, so you know you're in for a bad time right from the jump. Before doing it, though, he tells a clan of samurai why he’s been driven to such a state, and his tragic backstory makes the whole movie feel progressively more upsetting and confronting, and before the knife gets twisted literally, it figuratively twists again and again in (again, the figurative) stomach of the viewer.
Harakiri is not a fun sort of samurai or martial arts film, and is instead intended to brutally deconstruct a whole class/group from Japan’s history.
There is some swordplay here, and if you count samurai films as belonging to the martial arts genre, you can technically call Harakiri one. But it’s not a fun sort of samurai or martial arts film, and is instead intended to brutally deconstruct a whole class/group from Japan’s history, and suggest a lack of morality that’s sometimes assumed and associated with such people. It’s a fantastic film for sure, but also an immensely challenging one.
6 'Come and See' (1985)
Alexei Kravchenko in 'Come and See'Image via Sovexportfilm
Perhaps the most nightmarish of all war movies (or it’s at least a contender), Come and See offers nothing by way of thrills or excitement in its depiction of war, seen through the eyes of a child who loses his innocence and appears to age decades in the space of a couple of hours. He joins some resistance fighters in Belarus, but the invading German forces prove to be too strong, and so things just go from bad to worse and then keep sinking to new lows.
It's one of the more despairing movies out there, and though it’s not a horror film, Come and See is terrifying in just about every conceivable way. The feeling of heaviness comes about here because the weight of war – on a physical and psychological front – has seldom been this crushing, which is to the film’s credit while also being something that makes it difficult to recommend.
5 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023)
Robert De Niro as William Hale, leaning on a fence, in Killers of the Flower MoonImage via Apple TV
At the time of writing, Killers of the Flower Moon is the most recent film directed by the great Martin Scorsese, and it also could well be his heaviest. The Irishman certainly gives it a run for its money, with that one being like a Scorsese gangster film but creakier, slower, and more somber than usual, and uncompromising as an exploration of aging and regret.
There’s not as much of a personal angle to Killers of the Flower Moon, and it’s instead more sprawling, showing a series of crimes that occurred on a massive scale and over multiple years. It’s technically a Western, or a kind of Western, and a great one, but also a hugely soul-crushing one in the way it unpacks greed and the manner some people can normalize or try to personally justify the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. If you haven’t already lost your faith in humanity, a film like this could be the one to push you over the edge.
4 'Manchester by the Sea' (2016)
Michelle Williams as Randi and Casey Affleck as Lee talking on the street in Manchester By the SeaImage via Roadside Attractions
Manchester by the Sea is a straightforward drama if you're looking at things purely from a genre standpoint, but it stands out and excels because it’s such an emotionally brutal drama. It follows a man trying to make sense out of his various misfortunes and the feeling that his life is going downhill, with things being pretty sad for a while, until his past is fully explained, and then it all becomes devastating.
This does feel human, and maybe calling it “cruel” would itself be cruel to do, but Manchester by the Sea makes you squint pretty damn hard if you want to scan it to find any sort of hope or even marginally uplifting thing in it. Instead, it’s more just a film about anguish and the most intense sort of grief, all done in an attempt to make it feel as real as possible, and mortifyingly believable. Mission, perhaps unfortunately, accomplished.
3 'An Elephant Sitting Still' (2018)
Image via KimStim
Though it’s four hours long, it’s hard to call An Elephant Sitting Still an epic movie in the traditional sense, because the drama here is all very personal, and the timeframe covered is surprisingly short. It’s a debatable epic in the way Magnolia is, and though that 1999 film is also long and heavy, it’s not entirely crushing or 100% devoid of hope, whereas An Elephant Sitting Still is all about despair.
It was made by Hu Bo, who only ever directed this one feature film, and took his own life before it was released, and then subsequently praised for being about as uncompromising an exploration of depression and despair as there’s ever been on-screen. An Elephant Sitting Still is slow, but it’s also absorbing and undeniably tense, albeit in a quiet way, and it’s very much worth watching if you have both the time and the stomach for it.
2 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me' (1992)
David Lynch was no stranger to harrowing movies, but he had a lighter side too, and wasn’t just a cynic or pessimist by any means. There’s hope to be found, eventually, at the end of the otherwise mortifying Blue Velvet, for example, but then you come to something like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and it’s just non-stop with all the crushing things that happen and the overall sense of despair.
It does have to be that way, since Twin Peaks started with a horrifically tragic event, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me details the lead-up to that event, and then the event itself happening in unflinching detail. It also ends up making the more soul-crushing and tense parts of Twin Peaks, the show, feel even more intense once you have all that added context, so it’s a pretty remarkable achievement as far as surreal horror/mystery/tragedy movies go.
1 'The Human Condition' (1959-1961)
Tatsuya Nakadai as Kaji in The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961)Image via Shochiku
A film that lives up to its title by showing how rough it is to be human, The Human Condition actually does more than that, in all honesty, since it’s about World War II, shown from the perspective of a pacifist. He resists the war early on, finds himself unable to get out of it completely, and then after Japan surrenders, he’s left alone and forced to survive with the slim hope of returning to his old life.
The Human Condition is technically three epics in one, but can be seen as one gargantuan film that covers the before, during, and after of World War II, spending an epic’s worth of screen time on each. Every part of The Human Condition is harrowing and bleak in its own way, and it ends up being one of the greatest films of all time, sure, but also one of the most emotionally challenging.
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The Human Condition I: No Greater Love
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Drama
History
War
Release Date
December 14, 1959
Runtime
208 Minutes
Director
Masaki Kobayashi
Writers
Zenzô Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi, Jumpei Gomikawa
Cast
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Tatsuya Nakadai
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Michiyo Aratama
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
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