What’s the bleak­est film you’ve ever seen?

The inno­cent process of wak­ing up in the morn­ing has changed now that a despot­ic greas­er is treat­ing Amer­i­ca like an infant treats a nap­py. Before, we could ease into our dai­ly rou­tine, rel­a­tive­ly cer­tain that chances of death from above were, even on a bad day, pret­ty slim. Now, it seems any­thing goes. New day, fresh atroc­i­ty. And it’s depress­ing as hell. What’s more, the light at the end of the tun­nel seems far away, blur­ry, indis­tinct. Is that even a light, or is that a dude with a flam­ing torch and a crowbar?

It’s got us think­ing about movies that are absolute­ly with­out hope. What films are so crush­ing­ly bleak, that even to think about them caus­es shiv­ers of des­o­la­tion? Some call them ​“down­ers”, refer­ring to the fact that watch­ing them has the nox­ious, drug-like effect, induc­ing feel­ings of numbed agony. When con­sid­er­ing such films, one title always instant­ly (and some­what ran­dom­ly) springs to mind: Abel Ferrara’s 1996 dread opus, The Funer­al, about small­time New York gang­sters in 1930s New York.

Every­one will have their own, per­son­al, go-to bleak-out movie, but The Funer­al is mine. Imag­ine if Good­fel­las was remade, but the destruc­tion of the Amer­i­can idyll had already hap­pened, and there’s no Eric Clap­ton movies or super-fun death mon­tages. It’s a grind­ing trawl through the under­bel­ly of pet­ty crim­i­nal­i­ty, as Christo­pher Walken’s lethar­gic gang boss skulks around town look­ing for the per­son who killed his com­mie broth­er, John­ny (Vin­cent Gal­lo). Not only is the sub­ject mat­ter tremen­dous­ly bleak, but the way it has been made – slow pace, low-lit, long paus­es – super­charges that bleakness.

Else­where you’ve got the hor­rors of war writ very large in Elem Klimov’s Come and See, death from dis­ease in Ing­mar Bergman’s Cries and Whis­pers and mod­ern sex slav­ery in Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4‑Ever – all films that will have you drag­ging your­self from the cin­e­ma audi­to­ri­um and to the near­est dive-bar for a dou­ble shot of any­thing (and leave the bot­tle). But what is the most bleak film ever made? Which film best encap­su­lates these dark days, reflect­ing the mind­set of ratio­nal peo­ple the world over? Will watch­ing super-bleak films help us cre­ate a new norm, make us remem­ber that maybe, just maybe, it could be worse? Couldn’t it?

What’s the bleak­est film you’ve ever seen? Let us know @LWLies