I’d suggest: (Edit: added some descriptions, as I just now saw that’s what the OP asked for)
Larisa 1980 (a letter of farewell from the filmmaker to his deceased wife)
Land of Silence and Darkness 1971 (people being completely shut off from the world, except for their sense of touch)
The House is Black 1963 (a community of disfigured outcasts forced to live in a segregated camp)
The Free Will 2005 (a man torn apart by his violent urges, unable to escape his predispositions)
How is 2001 sad, it may be the most positive film ever, as it tells us that humans are not here to stay and the superhuman is coming.
“How is 2001 sad, it may be the most positive film ever, as it tells us that humans are not here to stay and the superhuman is coming.”
i can’t decide what’s stupider: thinking that there’s a definitive interpretation of 2001’s meaning, or thinking that your interpretation would make 2001 the most positive film ever
anyway, the most positive film ever is obviously IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
@Curtis
“anyway, the most positive film ever is obviously IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE”
… To the point of making me want to puke. No offense.
Too cynical for It’s a Wonderful Life? Now that’s sad.
@Nathan M
I wanted to love it… I really did… Maybe some day I’ll get my head out of the gutter and see it differently, but right now I just don’t like it.
Leo McCarey’s “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937). Saddest damn movie ever made.
Mikio Naruse Yearning
Films that make my heart sink…
(possible spoilers ahead)
Au Hasard Balthazar
Anybody can make a film about animal abuse… But what’s so heartbreaking about Balthazar is that we see a dumb animal learn to fear pain and become upset. The animal won’t know what to expect when you take your belt off until you begin whipping it. We follow it through abuse after abuse after abuse until it’s bitter end, when even other animals reject it’s presence, and it dies alone.
Happiness
Probably the saddest I’ve seen. These people will never achieve happiness, accepting companionship, success, love, or anything else they spend night after night hoping for. These aren’t sympathetic characters (some of them are downright evil, others are damned beyond return) but Solondz humanizes them to a point where our natural instinct is, surprisingly, to root for them. By the end, all is lost, all is hopeless, and the cycle of depravity will never stop. Each one of them desperately made an arguement that they have the right to live, only to be shut out by those who will never understand or remotely comprehend their damage.
Grave of the Fireflies
Damn, damn, damn….
The Pianist
What puts this a few pegs above Schindler’s List (for me) is that it is a much more 1-on-1 experience. We watch this poor man starve, fall into hopelessness, and be isolated, living every second in nightmarish fear. It even contemplates that fighting to survive is futile, and suicide may be Wladyslaw Szpilman’s only solace.
Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark
Lars Von Trier makes me hate humanity. I want to stop watching his movies for the sake of my young developing mind, but I CANT STOP.
Saving Private Ryan
Humans are expendable in war. In the beginning, they are all one in the same as they have their guts and limbs thrown around a beach. Ouch.
Requiem for a Dream
It hits close to home for me.
Enter the Void
Umberto D
Ikiru
The Bicycle Thief
Magnolia
Boogie Nights
When I first watched this, I was shrinking where I sat when it got into the more darker parts.
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
…. Gawt damn….
There are some good ones here, thanks to all who’ve posted.
That being said, I personally find a particular sadness in self anguish. What makes Dead Ringers (to return to some early posts) so painful is that he does it to himself in the midst of a fractured state of mind and then returns to find that it really happened. Contemplating that state of mind is crushing. I’m also a twin, so that could be a factor.
Its a similar pain in Grave of the Fireflies (and cartoons definitely count if there this sad) where you’re faced with a future that is too associated with regret to face. Maybe that’s melodrama, but it gets me
Incendies. Sad and depressing after all.
looking through this again I’m surprised Kids didn’t make it on here
also @Brad S. thank you for the post, I had somehow forgotten about Nobody Knows
Ugetsu
Ran
That last scene in Ran with the blind guy, that’s just gut wrenching.
Happy films and unhappy films are both awesome so long as that sentiment is earned. It’s A Wonderful Life, in my opinion, does earn its happy ending.
The ones to me that are really sad are the ones that really sell themselves as reality before tearing their heart out. Von Trier makes no attempt to sell his films as reality, and I feel neither does Cronenberg. Both ask the viewer to reflect on the fantasy they’ve created, not get swept up in it.
I showed Make Way for Tomorrow to my wife and she balled for the last hour of the movie and then hated me for showing it to her. That movie is SAD.
Yearning is a good choice, too.
[b] The elephant man
21 grams
Chinatown
City of life and death
Lives of others
1984
Pan’s Labyrinth
English patient
The Road
To live
Downfall
American History X
Thirst
Oldboy
Stalker
Last emperor
The orpahanage
Brazil
Dogville
Sin City
Lust, caution
The wind that shakes the barley
Eichmann
Kes
V for vendetta
Anti christ
Amorres Perros
Umberto D
Rossellini’s War Trilogy
Waltz with bashir
Casablanca
Life is beautiful
La Strada
Meghe dhaka tara
Bambi
My life to live
Ikiru
My life without me
Away from her
Dead poet’s society
The wall
Fargo
Gone with the wind
Liljya 4ever
Leaving las vegas
Raise the red lantern
Angela’s ashes
Winter Light
Wild Strawberries
Three color’s Blue
Three color’s White
Three color’s Red
Subarnareka
Mary and max
Eichmann
Rocco and his brothers
Death in venice
The leopard
Uzak
Gone with the wind
Sansho the bailiff
Travelling players
Landscape in the midst
Eternity and a day
Ulysses’s Gaze
Open your eyes
Birth
A river named Titash
Nazarin
Unforgiven
Sunset boulevard
Last tango in paris
Blow
Mystic River
Blue valentine
Ugetsu
Consequences of love
Andrei Rblev
Ivan’s Childhood
Nostalgia
Cries and whispers
Through a glass darkly
Das boot
Ran
Changeling
The constant gardener
Martyrs
Watership Down
La jetee
Johnny got his gun
The wrestler
Paths of glory
Mar Ardento
Eureka
The passion of Joan of arc
Diary of a country priest
Pickpocket
Ossessione
The Kid
Brute Force
Nights of cabiria
Au revoir les enfants
The sacrifice
Dekalog
Thelma and louise
The sweet hereafter
Remains of the day
Jalsaghar
Cold mountain
The secret life of words
The Silence
Synecdoche, New york
La notte bianche
Salo or the 120 days of sodom
Dead Ringers
Spider
Mulholland dr.
Solaris (Tarkovsky)
Irreversible
Fugitive kind
Scorching heat
The painted veil
Strozseck
Double life of Veronique
How green was my valley
Sophie scholl: final days [/b]
After life
The return
Banishment
Onibaba
To add to DOCBLOCK’s impressive list :
Loneliness of the long distance runner (Tony Richardson)
A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson)
The Children are Watching Us (Vittorio De Sica)
Still Life (Jia Zhangke)
Night and the City (Jules Dassin)
Yearning (Mikio Naruse)
3 Iron (Kim Ki Duk)
The Isle (Kim Ki Duk)
Damage (Louis Malle)
Angst (Gerald Kargl)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)
Naked (Mike Leigh) (depressing rather ! )
The River (Tsai Ming Liang)
Three Monkeys ( Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Vidas Secas ( Nelson Pereira Dos Santos)
The Idiots (Lars Von Trier)
Festen ( Thomas Vinterberg)
Dancer in the dark (Lars Von Trier)
The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci)
The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog)
Paris,Texas (Wim Wenders)
Shadow Kill (Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
Face to Face (Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
For the Information of my Mother (John Abraham)
Talk To Her (Pedro Almodovar)
La Promesse (Dardenne Brothers)
Maria Full Of Grace (Joshua Marston)
The Circle (Jafar Panahi)
Father (Majid Majidi)
The Cloud Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak)
East of Eden (Elia kazan)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
The Man with the golden arm (Otto Preminger)
The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger)
Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson)
My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant)
Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola)
Carrie (Brian De Palma)
The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet)
Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson)
Christ Stopped at Eboli (Francesco Rosi)
Paradise Now (Hany Abu Assad)
Man Push Cart (Ramin Bahrani)
Kids (Larry Clark)
The Cranes are flying (Mikhail Kalatozov)
When Father was away on business (Emir Kusturica)
My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Dog Days (Ulrich Seidl)
Love (original title : Szerelem) (Karoly Makk)
Umberto D sprung to mind.
Alright DOCBLOCK and to a lesser extent Mehdi Jahan, I think we need to set higher parameters on what is an incredibly sad film. I’ve seen the majority of the movies posted by Docblock and virtually none of them made me sad. The topic is THE SADDEST FILMS EVER MADE, not any movie that had a not entirely happy ending.
And Bambi? Parents die before there children, thats the natural progression of life and despite some trouble from being orphaned bambi grows up fine and strong. Would you call batman begins one of the saddest movies ever made? I doubt it
@Mehdi Jahan, sorry for this considering I just had a mini-rant, but why is 3 iron on your list. I find that movie to be one of the most glorious and uplifting movies I’ve ever seen. Its sad through out the whole middle of the film sure, but in the end (or rather through out the movie) 2 precocious individuals find freedom through their love, determination, and imagination. The sadder the lows the higher the highs, no?
cant call these ‘saddest’ but still-
25th Hour
A Serious Man
Requiem for a Dream
Shame(Steve McQueen)
The Bad Sleep Well – dark (Akira Kurosawa)
A Place in the Sun
No End(Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Shame(Ingmar Bergman)
Il Bidone(Federico Fellini)
Incendies
The Man Who wasnt There
The Manchurian Candidate
The Virgin Spring(Ingmar Bergman)
Vengeance is Mine(Shohei Imamura)
M
Metropolis
Easy Rider
Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
i may not call all of them saddest but surely they are tragic,dark or sad at some points. calling a movie saddest is one’s personal opinion.
and many of the titles mentioned by Docblock,too..
just saw EFFI BRIEST… that flick is up there… seems maybe a lot of fassbinder is… that man sure knows what it means to suffer!
@PITAA PANKI
I posted the films which I felt reflected a sad feeling rather than have an unhappy ending.
Likewise I felt that grave of the fireflies wasn’t a sad film. If you re concluding the logic of parents die before their child, then the way casualties in war are mostly innocent children so what was so saddening about grave of the fireflies ?
Come to think of it the both the children die due to negligence and the lack of refusal for the brother to work for a living.
@Docblock, my main point was just that a list of every sad movie you can think of isn’t that helpful. It would be more effective to just give a few particularly powerful films, which i think of as constructive towards future posts
as for what is sad, I suppose the poster early suggesting its subjective is pretty true. I just think that if a movie uses sadness to reinforce the happiness/accomplishment at the end of a film then the sadness is resolved. I also tend to relate to the characters in a movie so if the sadness is unresolved then I’m left feeling sad once its ended.
Idk, I hope that post makes sense/that we can avoid really long lists in the future. Furthermore, it’d be nice if posters could follow the examples of a few and give a description of why they find posted films sad
Thanks!
If I was in a really bad funk, had the second bottle of Scotch on the table, my t-shirt was lined with tears that had fallen over the last few hours, I even knew the Suicide Prevention Hotline volunteer’s name by heart from multiple calls—which movie would I put in the tray to ensure that I’d pick-up my Glock 9mm and finish the job?
Avatar
or
Titanic
or
Marvel’s The Avengers
or
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
or
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest
or
Toy Story 3
or
The Dark Knight
or
maybe even Old Yellow
Lars Von Trier, or Cronenberg are song and dance men compared to the genuine soul-crushing depression caused by Hollywood marketing department product.
The Way We Were. That last encounter at the Plaza is worthy of DeSica, and both “stars” turn into real actors and present it beautifully.
Does no one else see It’s a Wonderful Life as one of the angriest films ever done?
Owning Mahowny with Philip Seymour Hoffman
really depressing
Probably every film ever made by Haneke,Fassbinder and Seidl.
Patrice Leconte has produced a couple of sad ones:
The Hairdresser’s Husband and Monsieur Hire
Agnes Varda’s Vagabond is pretty powerful, as well.
clockworkdaisyblues
and, Maya Deren.
@Curtis Francis : oh I didn’t check The Passion of Joan of Arc.
@Răpciune, the Lacanian witch : Thanks, I feel some kind of thirst for something. Teuvo Tulio, Kim Soo-yong!