What’s the grimmest, bleakest or most pessimistic film or tv show you’ve ever seen?

[littlebabyjesus]

First two that spring to mind are both Hungarian, perhaps not coincidentally.

Son of Saul. It's an amazing achievement to make a film about the sonderkommando, and it is unremittingly grim and pessimistic as it must be.

Turin Horse. The only escape from the daily grind is death. Potato, potato, potato.

 

[StoneRoad]

Definitely "Threads"

and I agree it should be required viewing for politicians and other supporters of nuclear weapons.

I was [un]fortunate enough to see it before the general public release and found it aspects of it exceptionally horrifying.

 

[Pickman's model]

oh doctor beeching
maroc 7

you don't come out of viewing those unscathed

 

[Spymaster]

Come And See

Land of Mine

Grave of The Fireflies

 

[Sue]

The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

 

[The39thStep]

Definitely "Threads"

and I agree it should be required viewing for politicians and other supporters of nuclear weapons.

I was [un]fortunate enough to see it before the general public release and found it aspects of it exceptionally horrifying.

Someone’s making a documentary on it and is trying to identify who played the traffic warden that likesfish has as an avatar.

 

[ouirdeaux]

O-Bi O-Ba The End Of Civilization.

You haven't seen it. Nobody's seen it.

 

[rubbershoes]

The Road

The most distressing thing was the way they changed the book and gave it a Hollywood ending

 

[littlebabyjesus]

A Short Film About Killing

Eastern European theme emerging.

 

[May Kasahara]

I can't bear to watch most bleak stuff so loads of films on this list are things I know of/about but haven't actually seen. But I must add Lilya 4-Ever, a superb film that crushed me. The only time I've ever seen my best friend of 30+ years cry at a film.

 

[StoneRoad]

Someone’s making a documentary on it and is trying to identify who played the traffic warden that likesfish has as an avatar.

Chances are that they would be deceased by now.

 

[StoneRoad]

Definitely "Threads"

and I agree it should be required viewing for politicians and other supporters of nuclear weapons.

I was [un]fortunate enough to see it before the general public release and found it aspects of it exceptionally horrifying.

Been reminded that the 1960s "War Game" was somewhat similar ...

 

[Saul Goodman]

Watership Down.

 

[Nanker Phelge]

I watched too many of the films mentioned here when I was in my teens. This might explain the mood I've found myself in throughout my adulthood!

 

[a_chap]

Easily the bleakest film I've ever seen is "Lilya 4 Ever". It makes Last Exit to Brooklyn, Nil by mouth, Scum, etc. look like rom coms in comparison.

Warning: it really is a disturbing and depressing film

 

[Orang Utan]

I can't bear to watch most bleak stuff so loads of films on this list are things I know of/about but haven't actually seen. But I must add Lilya 4-Ever, a superb film that crushed me. The only time I've ever seen my best friend of 30+ years cry at a film.

Good call. I’ve got a boxset of Moodysson’s films that remains unwatched, partly cos I’m not sure I could take another viewing of Lilya-4-Ever.
I read an interview with Moodysson who claims that the film has a happy ending (because, IIRC, of Lilya’s Christan beliefs and she gets to reunite with her little friend in heaven). It’s hard to see it that way, in my view.

 

[Fez909]

Requiem For a Dream

 

[Winot]

Hotel Rwanda

 

[scifisam]

In a different way to intentionally bleak (and enjoyable in a depressing way) films like Threads and the Plague Dogs, one of the most depressing films I've ever seen is This Is Forty. The couple in it just make each other miserable; the wife hates the husband and the husband reacts by running away emotionally. Everyone in it is vile. At one point it seems hopeful: they go on holiday and renew their feelings for each other. But nope, when they get back they're instantly the same as before, so the holiday was just there to drive home the message that, even when it seems like things might get better, they definitely won't.

It's presented as a comedy and genuinely left me feeling down for days.

 

[Knotted]

I would go with The War Game over Threads. Just because it's a quasi-documentary with street interviews, it brings home the reality.

 

[skyscraper101]

One Foot In The Grave is pretty bleak. I didn't notice this until I re-watched it more recently but every episode seems to end on a downer, which is quite interesting for a sitcom. The very final episode was very dark at the end too.

Otherwise, Threads is still the most harrowingly bleak thing I've ever seen. 1984 is also pretty bleak and up there with it.

 

[Sweet FA]

The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael is not a great film in the context of all film ever made, but it is grimly powerful and upsetting, and IMO is a much better work than its reviews tend to suggest. It is a low budget, kitchen sink-y drama about banality, boredom, never quite synchronising with other people, alienation, hopelessness, but then it segues into one scene which is all artifice and ‘unrealistic’ - played absolutely straight, yet staged absolutely off-kilter to everything else - which forces the audience into complicity. It's in the same ballpark as similar tricks played by the directors of films like C'est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous (Man Bites Dog) or Funny Games but without the humour or cynicism, and it is jarring because the main character, someone whom we have followed through the film up to this point, someone we have been sympathetic to, someone not heroic or villainous - just someone bland, ordinary, uncharismatic - is behaving in a way which is both wrong but also believable, despite being presented ‘non-realistically’.

That film wrecked me for days - I'd never heard of it and didn't read the blurb, I was hungover, think I saw Danny Dyer was in it and went from there...

From a thread I started in 2007 (zero replies ):

Anyone seen this? I watched it last night (with a crippling hangover) and can't figure out if it was juvenile, misogynistic and offensive or nihilistic, anti-war and meaningful in some way. Some of the scenes were really well built up - round the dealers when the schoolgirl is raped, others (most of the ones with Danny Dyer in tbf) were amateurish.

Was the final (extremely prolonged) rape scene really necessary (to the film or it's message or whatever)? It was a direct rip from Clockwork Orange obviously, so in a way you've seen it before but well...wtf?!

It'd be easier to dismiss it if it didn't have a few redeeming features - cinematography was beautiful in places, the 'blank' acting of the lead was quite compelling, it's British...

 

[DaveCinzano]

People often mention When The Wind Blows alongside Threads, but I think that, circumstances aside, it’s actually a rather sweet and touching depiction of a long-married couple who are clearly devoted to each other, together til the end in sickness and in health

I remember reading the book when it first came out, and I loved it, but I had a six-year old's very literal sense of understanding, so whilst it had lots of grim moments and unpleasantness and dread and doom, it was presented in a very jolly way, and with a pair of sympathetic, kind-hearted if somewhat not-complex central characters whom I knew and loved from Gentleman Jim, with lots of their familiar back-and-forth and reminiscing and so on. I mean, at the end of the book, they're a bit poorly, but they're together, and they have a nice lie-down.

It wasn't until a few years later that for some reason my primary school teacher played the film for us and then afterwards we did a comprehension exercise and there was a question along the lines of So, how'd you feel when the old dudes died at the end? and I was very much Wait - whut? DEAD?! No fucking way... «flicks to back of book» ...see, they're not dead they're just... Ahhhhhh right, gotcha

So for me the emotional power of the book was largely drawn from the ‘sweet and touching’ Jim/Hilda relationship that Orang Utan points to, rather than a sense of horror or pessimism or fear (though those elements are all there); it was only later watching the film that those beats were there for me in the foreground.

 

[salem]

Christiane F - a German film set in 80s Berlin about a young girl and her friends who get addicted to Herion. True story and a great film but certainly bleak - both in the story and it's aesthetic

 

[Wolveryeti]

I recall Requiem for a Dream being pretty bleak. TV stuff I dunno - Chernobyl maybe?

 

[DaveCinzano]

That film wrecked me for days - I'd never heard of it and didn't read the blurb, I was hungover, think I saw Danny Dyer was in it and went from there...

From a thread I started in 2007 (zero replies ):

Anyone seen this? I watched it last night (with a crippling hangover) and can't figure out if it was juvenile, misogynistic and offensive or nihilistic, anti-war and meaningful in some way. Some of the scenes were really well built up - round the dealers when the schoolgirl is raped, others (most of the ones with Danny Dyer in tbf) were amateurish.

Was the final (extremely prolonged) rape scene really necessary (to the film or it's message or whatever)? It was a direct rip from Clockwork Orange obviously, so in a way you've seen it before but well...wtf?!

It'd be easier to dismiss it if it didn't have a few redeeming features - cinematography was beautiful in places, the 'blank' acting of the lead was quite compelling, it's British...

Dyer himself is not a fan of the film, but I would argue it's an excellent performance from him, the character he presents works, it helps misdirect away from what subsequently happens.

It looks like I've reccoed it before, in 2009 on a thread entitled GRIM FILMS:

The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael plods along through banality into grimness before ending in a particularly grim crescendo.

 

[mojo pixy]

I was about to post Requiem for a Dream! First time I watched that I had to put on Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron as antidote

But also Don't Look Up.

 

[Saul Goodman]

The Royle Family has it all. Absolutely brilliant.

 

[Saul Goodman]

Shameless was another

 

[DaveCinzano]

The Chekist - about a member of a Bolshevik execution squad slowly but surely dissolving as the bodies pile up - is best not watched when you're feeling fragile. It's undulating, unrelenting, with no relief in pace or escalating/deescalating emotions, just a conveyor belt of death.

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