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

Those Red Triangle films were an education. I always set the VHS recorder on those, and then settled in to get head fucked the next morning. I rarely had a clue what was going on in many of them as I was really too young at the time.
The crowd I was with at the time, we watched them tripping off our faces which made the expected titillation a much more serious affair at times.
 
Think I saw one of those Red Triangle films, or part of one. IIRC had a similar premise To The Idiots, but instead of pretending to be disabled, this fella is pretending to be a caveman. Can’t remember much of a it, apart from a policeman being killed and eaten. It might have been French.
I’ve probably conflated more than one film here, cos I saw bits of films like in snatches cos I wasn’t supposed to be watching it and my mum would sometimes interrupt me when she couldn’t sleep and came downstairs to make a camomile tea.
Wow, haven’t thought about that in years
 
I hate grim films. I'm pessimistic and gloomy enough without indulging some film director's desire to make me feel worse.

I remember feeling really pissed off after watching Naked. Grim, exploitative and ultimately pointless. I wanted to post a turd through the director's letterbox. You want grim mate? Have some.
 
I have a vague memory of watching a German film in the early '80s, for no better reason than language practice. When asked what it was about, I said it showed someone wandering about being schizophrenic in Berlin to the tune of share prices. That was roughly it, but I can't remember what the film was called.
 
I found that one rather endearing though - unfussy, everyday, unhistrionic, observing its subjects without judgement

i had mixed reactions to both Clarke films (i know there are more but i haven't seen them). the subject matter was sad-to-horrifying, but they were so esthetically done that it took the sting out. that they were on television is shocking though, to me a yank.
 
That reminds me of another Russian film - Loveless, about a neglected child - I didn’t finish it so maybe there was a Oliver Twist ending. I very much doubt it though.
saw that. You are right. And you've just made me more depressed by remembering it, you bastard.
 
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Leaving Las Vegas was fucking devastating for me. Admittedly I was tripping balls in the happiest possible way when I saw it, which I am sure didn't help. A group of us had just returned home from the legendary late 90s Gay Pride festival in Clapham Common, the last free event and the best one ever held, pilled up and happy as fuck intending to just freshen up and go out again. But my flatmate was watching the film as we walked in and everyone else in the group sat down and became instantly absorbed by it so we ended up watching it. The worst drug comedown of my life, and a film I have firmly avoided since.
 
Leaving Las Vegas was fucking devastating for me. Admittedly I was tripping balls in the happiest possible way when I saw it, which I am sure didn't help. A group of us had just returned home from the legendary late 90s Gay Pride festival in Clapham Common, the last free event and the best one ever held, pilled up and happy as fuck intending to just freshen up and go out again. But my flatmate was watching the film as we walked in and everyone else in the group sat down and became instantly absorbed by it so we ended up watching it. The worst drug comedown of my life, and a film I have firmly avoided since.
hah my mate who is a little ...aggressive...put on Platoon at 7am for one of our comedowns once :D luckily managed to laugh the whole thing off
 
So many. So many already mentioned I don't even want to see.

In the dim and distant past Chelsea Odeon had a double bill of Soldier Blue and Straw Dogs. It was not a great date night.
my parents went to see a double bill of viva la muerte and un chien andalou while courting
they're french
The most distressing thing was the way they changed the book and gave it a Hollywood ending
I hate it when they do this, "the getaway" is one of my main gripes with this

e2a: brazil is pretty bleak
 
Think I saw one of those Red Triangle films, or part of one. IIRC had a similar premise To The Idiots, but instead of pretending to be disabled, this fella is pretending to be a caveman. Can’t remember much of a it, apart from a policeman being killed and eaten. It might have been French.
I’ve probably conflated more than one film here, cos I saw bits of films like in snatches cos I wasn’t supposed to be watching it and my mum would sometimes interrupt me when she couldn’t sleep and came downstairs to make a camomile tea.
Wow, haven’t thought about that in years
That sounds like Themroc. Saw that when it came out, but wasn't overly impressed. (He'd previously made a film called Bof! which I'd liked a lot, although my opinion changed when I saw it again years later).
 
Think I saw one of those Red Triangle films, or part of one. IIRC had a similar premise To The Idiots, but instead of pretending to be disabled, this fella is pretending to be a caveman. Can’t remember much of a it, apart from a policeman being killed and eaten. It might have been French.
I’ve probably conflated more than one film here, cos I saw bits of films like in snatches cos I wasn’t supposed to be watching it and my mum would sometimes interrupt me when she couldn’t sleep and came downstairs to make a camomile tea.
Wow, haven’t thought about that in years

No, that was all in one film.


He was actually eating a pig that had been used in place of the actor playing the policeman. This was done for laughs obviously, as it was clearly a dead pig body doubling as a dead cop.
 
Think I saw one of those Red Triangle films, or part of one. IIRC had a similar premise To The Idiots, but instead of pretending to be disabled, this fella is pretending to be a caveman. Can’t remember much of a it, apart from a policeman being killed and eaten. It might have been French.
I’ve probably conflated more than one film here, cos I saw bits of films like in snatches cos I wasn’t supposed to be watching it and my mum would sometimes interrupt me when she couldn’t sleep and came downstairs to make a camomile tea.
Wow, haven’t thought about that in years
It was called “Themroc” which is pretty much the only dialogue in the film. I think that was the first in the Red Triangle series.

ETA just noticed it’s already been identified upthread
 
The most distressing thing was the way they changed the book and gave it a Hollywood ending
Dr. Zhivago's actually an odd example of that - and it has far more grim bits in it than I think people remember. The book is an explicit, Christian, repudiation of the October Revolution and everything it stood for - the film verges on Orthodox Trotskyism at points. And in the book Strelnikov never actually joins the party, they just give him an armoured train to tootle around Siberia in, while being revolutionary.
 
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
I once went to a double bill at the old Scala in Kings Cross with that followed by Panic in Needle Park, an Al Pacino heroin film. I never wanted to see another needle in my life after that.

A non-drug one that’s pretty grim is The Wages of Fear, a ‘53 film about guys driving trucks laden with nitroglycerin over treacherous routes. It’s a brilliant thriller but its depiction of men, man, greed and capitalism is really bleak.
 
A non-drug one that’s pretty grim is The Wages of Fear, a ‘53 film about guys driving trucks laden with nitroglycerin over treacherous routes. It’s a brilliant thriller but its depiction of men, man, greed and capitalism is really bleak.

one of my favorite films.
i seem to like long, slow, black and white movies that have unhappy material. mr arkadin and andrei rublev are two others, though rublev isn't grim.
los olvidados is grim though.
 
Capernaum - an unrelentlessly bleak film about children living in the slums of Beruit. Features poverty, child brides, drug addiction, human trafficking and a kid who sues his parents for giving birth to him (reasonable in this context).
 
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