10 miserable movies guaranteed to ruin your day
For some, movies are a method of escape, a way of shutting out the darker elements of life and revelling in pure joy. However, for the more melancholy among us, cinema is a place to go to make everything even more miserable.
The general remit for cinema is to entertain, but failing that, the goal is to engage. Not everybody wants to sit down and watch something that’s supposed to make them experience joy, elation, excitement, and adrenaline, just like there are plenty of viewers who’d never consider viewing anything that stands a chance of reducing them to a quivering, blubbering, emotional wreck.
A good movie doesn’t necessarily have to be an uplifting one, and conversely, a downbeat picture designed to evoke a guttural reaction isn’t automatically a bad one. Sure, there’s a middle ground somewhere, but the following ten titles weren’t remotely interested in finding it.
Whether it’s being a glutton for punishment or otherwise, the one thing these movies have in common is that they’ll easily turn a good day into a bad one and a bad one into a worse one. Some films start off bleak and end up redeeming themselves later, but not these. They are all horrible pretty much all the way through, and most of them end on the flattest of flat notes.
10 movies guaranteed to ruin your day:
‘Kes’ (Ken Loach, 1969)
British director Ken Loach has spent over 60 years trying to put people off visiting the UK by displaying how bleak a place it is. His frank, unrelenting depictions of working-class life are legendary, with perhaps his most famous work being 1969’s Kes.
The story follows Billy (Dai Bradley), a young boy living in Yorkshire whose life is enriched when he befriends an injured kestrel. Most movies would end with Billy and Kes flying off into the sunset together. Not this one. Instead, Kes ends with Billy’s brother killing the bird in an act of petty revenge and then dumping its body in a bin. You’re a sick man, Ken, a sick man.
‘Funny Games’ (Michael Haneke, 1997)
The original German-language version of Funny Games is a horror movie about a pair of sadists who take a family hostage in their Austrian holiday home. It is a brutal watch, 109 minutes of physical and emotional torture including, but not limited to, child murder.
Director Michael Haneke intended the piece to be a commentary on the senseless violence on display in modern cinema, but he might have pulled this off a little too well. The movie ends with all the good guys dead and the killers wandering off scot-free, the antithesis of a happy ending.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ (Lars Von Trier, 2000)
Honestly, this list could have been all Lars Von Trier films. The depraved Dane is famed for his horrifying flights of fancy, which regularly include scenes of graphic sexual violence, with one of his best (or worst, depending on your taste) efforts being 2000’s Dancer in the Dark.
Starring Icelandic musician and professional eccentric Björk, the film follows a woman’s attempt to raise money for an operation on her son’s eyes. A murky take on the American dream, Dancer in the Dark has the outline of a warm and happy musical; however, it is anything but.
‘Vivre sa vie’ (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
You can always count on Jean-Luc Godard to rain on your parade. The French New Wave visionary had no time for fluffy fairytales, instead prioritising striking visuals and unconventional narrative functions in his various works.
In 1962, he released Vivre sa vie (known as It’s My Life in the UK), a segmented story of a woman forced into sex work by the grim trials of life. Of course, sex work is nothing to be ashamed of, but the lead character, played by Godard’s wife, Anna Karina, suffers greatly while in the profession, and the film ends with her being killed by crossfire in a pimp gunfight.
‘Sid and Nancy’ (Alex Cox, 1986)
The real story of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen is depressing as hell, so it stands to reason that the film version of their lives would be the same. With Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb in starring roles, it follows the pair as they fall in love, fall out of love, and come to a tragic end.
It’s not supposed to be an easy watch, but that doesn’t make it any more palatable. Grim, dark, dreary, depressing, and absolutely capable of ruining a perfectly good day should anyone find themselves brave enough to give it a watch when they’re on top of the world.
‘Precious’ (Lee Daniels, 2009)
Based on the novel Push by Ramona ‘Sapphire’ Lofton, Precious follows Gabourey Sidibe’s title character as she navigates existence in New York City while faced with a life of poverty. Her father is a horrendous man who has gotten his own daughter pregnant twice, so Precious lives with her mother, an unemployed, depressed abuser in her own right.
Precious does end on a positive note, which should disqualify it from this list, but the overall tone of the film is so horrific that it barely counts as uplifting. It’s not one to put on for a cozy Sunday evening watch.
‘The Road’ (John Hillcoat, 2009)
Also released in 2009 and based on a book, The Road is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. It stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son traversing a barren landscape in the wake of an unnamed apocalypse. As you can imagine, this isn’t an ideal family day out.
The characters face all sorts of horrors on their journey as humanity has receded to an animalistic state. It is devastating to watch formerly civilised people tear each other apart in a misguided attempt to survive, and although the boy finds some hope at the end of the film, the same cannot be said for his dear old dad.
‘Grave of the Fireflies’ (Isao Takahata, 1988)
If you want to maintain your mental image of Studio Ghibli as the company that makes wholesome films full of fluffy animals, then for the love of Hayao Miyazaki, don’t watch Grave of the Fireflies.
Set during the final days of World War II, this animated feature follows the lives of a brother and sister as American planes bomb their home city of Kobe. A stark depiction of wartime horror, the juxtaposition of stunning animation and terrifying events only serves to make this even harder to watch. My Neighbour Totoro, this ain’t.
‘The Wages of Fear’ (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
We’ve all had bad jobs in our time, but nothing compares to the plight of the characters in the classic French feature, The Wages of Fear. A group of men are hired to drive a convoy of highly unstable nitroglycerin across a treacherous mountain pass in order to help put out an oil rig fire. Sounds easy enough: actually, no, it doesn’t.
The Wages of Fear feels utterly futile, a scathing takedown of capitalism and its disregard for human life. Every single character dies in the end: two from an exploding truck, one from a wound suffered on the journey, and one from driving too fast on the way back home, which hammers the point home even further.
‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ (Mark Herman, 2008)
If you were to programme a machine to write the most depressing story ever, chances are it would churn out something very similar to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Based on John Boyne’s novel, the story captures the unlikely friendship between the son of a Nazi officer and a Jewish boy imprisoned in a concentration camp.
In the film’s unforgettable final twist, Bruno (Asa Butterfield) sneaks into the camp to join Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), accidentally joining him in the gas chamber. A punch to the gut, a kick in the teeth, a baseball bat to the back of the head, call it what you will. This film hurts.
