Are there any movies that don't have a happy ending?
Asked by
rangerr (
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)
November 23rd, 2009
I’m in the mood for a good, depressing movie, but all of the ones I can think of have a happy ending. Happy endings make me hate everything even more right now.
Are there any movies that end on a bad note?
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The original Titanic with Barbra Stanwick.
Night Of The Living Dead
Brazil
The Mist.
I’ll never watch that movie again!
Here’s a review of Control which I think will fit the bill.
The Last King of Scotland
Hotel Rwanda
7 Pounds
Schindler’s List? Never seen it, but I think I know how it ends…
I echo @DominicX‘s suggestion. Also, Love Liza; great story, not well-known, and definitely doesn’t end well.
I remember showing my daughter the Original Titanic. When it was over, she was wailing, crying…She had never seen a movie with a sad ending before. She was shaken to the core.
@sndfreQ I thought the ending of The Notebook was really cute.
I’ll have to look up some of these.. thanks all!
The Bicycle Thief = sadface.
Marley and Me….
im scared to watch it :(
The Uninvited is perfect if you’re looking for an unhappy ending.
The English Patient
Miserable ending really.
The Hannah Montana Movie
Damn, she doesn’t die.
King Kong 2
Happily Never After
My two favorites… Gone with the Wind and Seven Years in Tibet.
Some movies are very sad but in the end there is an uplifting of spirit or a lesson is learned or there is hope for the future. Not these movies, they are about futility and waste of human potential.
In Cold Blood
On the Beach
Testament (a must-see for Bay Area Jellies, the bomb falls on SF)
Gallipoli
Harold and Maude
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. ( but it’s really a terrible movie, not because it doesn’t have a happy ending but because it’s so incomprehensible that you don’t care what happens to whom)
I would say the mist too.. someone already said it..
And the birds… it’s not a happy ending.. it’s a retarded ending.
@galileogirl Good call on Gallipoli and Testament.
Ya, Bay Area gets nuked, and thats not the end of the movie. Great film!
@filmfann In On the Beach when they send a sub to see if there are any survivors in the northern hemisphere, they pop up in SF. I love hometown films.
Gran Torino.
I think. Maybe I missed the message of that movie.
Why are you ignoring me, Sarcasm :(
It’s not a really sad ending if there are any redeeming values!
As long as we’re going with Clint Eastwood movies…
Million Dollar Baby
Star Wars, Episode 1. Jar Jar Binks doesn’t die, and you know there are two more movies before you get to the good stuff. Also, Star Wars, Episode 2. And Star Wars Episode 3 is mixed – the story ending is a downer, but at least the unholy trilogy is over.
Gone with the Wind
Titanic
Romeo & Juliet
Moulin Rouge
Seven
Fight Club
Oh god, the Mist- I mistakenly chose that movie for our anniversary night out last year. Bad choice. OMFG…
@Dog Really? Too bad I missed it for Sack Lunch,
@ubersiren Definitely going to second Seven! and I’m going to add The Grey Zone it is an excellent movie and could not be further from a happy ending.
I consider all movies where the good guys win a “not happy ending”.
Pulp Fiction. In my opinion. I would say why but I don’t want to give anything away to anyone here who hasn’t seen it…
All these movies are good choices, but the single most depressing, sad ending is in Dancer in the Dark, I guarantee you that one fits EXACTLY what you’re looking for.
@ubersiren Fight Club’s ending is happy. How is it not?
@chelseababyy He realizes he’s just insane, and doesn’t actually have a friend.
@Sarcasm He’s with Marla and they have no cares at that moment, and the movie ends. i see that as happy.
^ I consider it a happy ending because it ends with^ Perfection!
Steele Magnolias. Some think it ends well, but not for me.. That poor little baby will have to grow up without a Mother. I can’t get that out of my head even when the Easter bunny rides away on his motorcycle on his way to the maternity ward….. :(
@colladom Welcome to fluther GA! i cried like a baby after watching it definitely not a happily ever after story! :(
My daughter was upset with the end of the original Matrix.
The movie was over, and everyone was still hooked up to the machines! He didn’t save anyone!
Saving Private Ryan
Million Dollar Baby
Philadelphia
Brave Heart
There are lots of them
City of Angels (though it is slightly uplifting at the end).
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
Fargo
Someone mentioned No Country for Old Men.
I am so sorry that I wasted two hours of my precious time watching that. Someone got it on their Netflix cue and invited everyone else in the house to watch. All I knew was that it had all this Oscar buzz so I got suckered in by that. But what a totally pointless waste of time !
I’ll have to agree with Requiem for a Dream, There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men, though I thought NCfOM was over-rated.
I’d like to add Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant, Fargo and Cold Mountain. In fact, of all of these, I think Cold Mountain is the best (with Reservior Dogs a close second and Fargo a close third.) Cold Mountain stuck very close to the book (also wonderful, by the way), which was surprising and refreshing. In my opinion, it was a travesty the way The Academy dissed Cold Mountain simply because it was filmed over seas. But, of course, The Academy is a joke anyway…
Sling Blade was also great, but I suppose you could almost qualify that as happy ending, as twisted as that may sound.
And on a final note, Titanic and Gone with the Wind absolutely suck, so if you want to be depressed after watching a movie, then you could give them a go as well…
King Of New York
Scarface
Midnight Cowboy
No one has said American History X?
@mowens That’s my favorite. Why I didn’t think about it, I have no idea. Lurve!
Resivior dogs, pulp fiction… Seven
Enough here to make you want to go jump off a bridge.
Hamlet—with Mel Gibson (of course same story, I just like the one with Gibson in it).
Terms of Endearment
The Ultimate Gift – they try to end it on a happy note, but come on!
Beaches
Patch Adams – I can’t remember how it ends, but it had a depressing part that pretty much ended it for me.
The Wrestler. At least not to me.
The Wrestler was ambigious
Can’t believe I sat through that
Oh, oh, oh! Pay it Forward.
swimming with sharks…...great movie strange ending….kevin spacey at his best
Cannibal Holocaust comes to mind.
Lurve for Cannibal holocaust. An extremely underrated movie
Imo, those explorers deserved what they got.
They certainly did. But it was still pretty nasty.
I just watched Requiem for a Dream. Damn. Just damn.
@Jayne awesome movie-I’ll never look at a bowl of tapioca the same way ever again ;)
Many. But The Pawnbroker was especially grim.
The House of the Devil has a pretty depressing ending.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
And The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ending was ambiguous at best.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
And The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ending was ambiguous at best.
And of course, Das Boot which was bombed and sank after returning home from its perilous mission
Sweet holy moly, “Easy Rider”, “The House of Sand And Fog”, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, “Looking For Mr. Goodbar, “Quarantine”, “Cloverfield” though it was a very hard movie to sit through, and John Carpinter’s “The Thing” are a few I can think of.
I had to register to this forum just to say this. I see that most of the movies mentioned in this topic are mentioned just because one or two key characters die in the end. I mean, that’s not necessarily sad and unhappy ending, not by a long shot.
The ending itself can’t be defined simply by deaths of characters. It’s the atmosphere and the key events that make the ending sad or happy, or both. But defining ‘sad’ and ‘happy’ depends entirely on the person defining them, so you can’t really recommend a movie for someone unless you know what he/she thinks is sad and what is happy.
All in all, I’d say you can’t really measure on a public forum what’s what because there’s so many unfamiliar people around.
(Now I feel like I made a huge fuzz out of a small matter, sorry about that.)
I myself can’t stand something I like to call an american (nothing personal) ending or a hollywood ending. What I mean is the sort of ending where the hero gets his girl and kisses her in front of a live audience. And then everyone start to applaud. You all know what I’m talking about.
I hate those syrupy endings. I mean, they’re disgusting and unreal. But I guess there are people who like that kind of stuff. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of those movies.
What I’d like to see is something totally out of the blue. Something you can’t predict or expect. I have not yet seen a film that could knock me off my seat. And neither an unpredictable or entirely unhappy ending. I’m still waiting for it to come.
_______
Just few of my thoughts for you to chew on.
- Aimethe
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