The TV Addict 

10. Don’t Look Now
The final scenes of DON’T LOOK BACK culminate in a series of events that one can immediately and instinctively sense are building to something horribly tragic, but we can’t do anything about it, nor can we look away. There’s a frightening inevitability to it all (aided by Donald Sutherland’s eerie prophetic vision), a sense that everything that has happened in the film has just been one domino bumping into another until the final one falls. That final domino, of course, being the demise of Sutherland, whose guilt and grief over the death of his daughter unexpectedly leads him to his shocking death.

9. The Descent (Original Ending)
All of her friends dead, we watch as Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) finally succeed in finding her way out of the cave full of creepy monsters. She makes it to her car and drives off. Just as we think she’s home-free, there’s a flash of a bloodied friend left behind in the cave, and suddenly we cut back to the cave. Sarah never left. It was all a dream that finally broke her sanity. We’re left with her hallucinating the presence of her dead daughter, muttering to herself while the darkness closes in around her, the distant cries of the creatures echoing across the walls. Will she killed by them, or become one of them? Who knows.

8. Old Boy
The main character finds out that he was manipulated to willfully (but unknowingly) commit incest with his own daughter. When he finds this out, he begs like a dog, then cuts his tongue out and offers it to the orchestrator of this horrific mess as a symbol of the silence he wishes him to keep. It goes on from there, but really, do you need anything more than that to justify the placement of this film on the list?

7. No Country For Old Men
Part of it is the fact that our hero gets killed off-screen by a random group of strangers. Then there’s the fact that his wife – a complete innocent – gets murdered by Javier Bardem, fulfilling some twisted personal code. There’s also the matter of Bardem getting away scot-free, if a little worse for wear. And then that the Sheriff – who in most films would save the day – just passes away quietly into retirement. But for me it’s really Tommy Lee Jones’ dream that serves as the depressing epitaph to the film that (admittedly this is entirely dependent on my fledgling interpretation) suggests there’s hope maybe somewhere up ahead “in all that dark, all that cold,” but that we’re never going to get there because we wake up to the way the world really is – according to the film – and realize we can’t.

Note: Though the clip below does feature the ending, for some reason the person who posted it thought it would somehow be funny to have the Burger King guy in the background. So yeah, just ignore that.

6. Easy Rider
Though I feel the film is dated, and too much a product of its time for me to ever really be able to fully appreciate it, there’s no denying how upsetting it is to watch our hipster heroes abruptly meet their ends as the world they had been running away from finally catches up to them with senseless, bigoted violence, against which they had no chance. All that’s left of their hippie ambitions is two bodies, a burning motorcycle, the empty lifeless American landscape, and the credits.

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

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