The REEL Addict 

5. Night of the Living Dead
Even without its rife political and racial insinuations, the ending of THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is devastating to watch just because the main protagonist – who has out survived everyone else for the entire film – ends up shot in head just because he is confused with the very things he survived from. Dramatic irony doesn’t even begin to cover it.

4. The Mist
Admittedly a very recent film, but that by no means should dull the impact of its devastating ending that leaves you feeling like someone punched you in the stomach. It’s not just that Thomas Jane carries out a suicide pact that involves him killing his own son, and leaves him alive to deal with the emotional fallout. It’s that when he steps outside to leave himself to the monsters, he is instead greeted by the military. Had he waited only five minutes more, everyone would have survived. It’s like something right out of a Greek tragedy.

3. Memento
One of the most disturbing endings I’ve ever seen in a film, largely because it’s an incredibly bleak answer to the existential question of how far some of us might go to ensure our own happiness and purpose, to ensure that our “actions still have meaning,” to ensure that somehow – in the face of every day tragedy – we still can go on.

2. Requiem for a Dream
If I should ever stupidly get addicted to any form of drug, I would want my intervention to involve nothing more than a screening of this film. Heck, I don’t even have to be an addict to be left utterly breathless with the culminating scenes here, revealing the devastation them characters’ addictions wreck upon their lives. The counter-point of Ellen Burstyn imagining her happy infomercial appearance with her son makes the ending that much harder to take by highlighting what was really lost.

1. Chinatown
The girl dies, the bad guy wins, and all the efforts of our hero to solve the case go for nothing. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Jack Gittes – and by extension the audience – is told to forget everything that happened, and yet is that possible with that sick feeling sitting in one’s gut that all was for naught?

For Part One of our 15 Bleakest Movies (15-11), click here.

For Part Two of our 15 Bleakest Movies (5-1), click here.