Positivity be damned – these films paint a wonderfully grim picture of reality
If you were looking for upbeat films where everyone lives happily ever after, boy howdy, did you click on the wrong story. There's a time and a place for those movies, certainly, but it isn't here. Not now lockdown has been extended.
Instead, we've channelled our inner Nietzsche and compiled a list of our favourite films that are 100 per cent soul-crushingly bleak. From dystopian wastelands to harrowing dreamscapes, these films will not only make you feel all the feelings, but they do so with finesse and aplomb – despair has never looked so beautiful.
Misery loves company, so grab your nearest and dearest household members and enjoy (maybe not the right word) one of the bleakest films you can watch right now.
Recommended: The best films that feature a time loop.
The Road is the bleakest of bleak films. The film follows a nameless man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) through a wasteland following an undisclosed ecological disaster. The film rarely deviates from its grey-washed landscapes and with a score by Nick Cave, you know this is going to be dark.
Watch it in Australia: Stream it on Stan or Binge, or rent or buy from Google Play and YouTube.
Multiple rapes. Infanticide. Aboriginal strange fruit. You’ve been warned. Brutal is too soft a word to describe ‘The Nightingale’, a brilliantly harrowing indictment of white male oppression set in British-ruled Australia circa 1825. If you thought Jennifer Kent pulled no punches in her terrifying supernatural debut ‘The Babadook’, brace yourself for the existential evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
Watch it in Australia: Stream on Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube or Microsoft let you rent or buy the film.
You can almost taste the salt on your lips in this psychological horror from Robert Eggers (The Witch). It’s a two-handed chamber piece about a pair of lighthouse keepers living on a remote island off the New England coast at the turn of the 20th century and it’s lit up by mesmerising performances from Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. Whereas Eggers' The Witch left you with a sense of closure, The Lighthouse remains profoundly, beautifully upsetting right through to the credits.
Watch it in Australia: Stream it on Kanopy, or Google Play, Microsoft, YouTube or Apple TV have it to rent or buy.
While Hollywood bores us with sundry CGI-heavy visions of the apocalypse, the very intimacy of this modest Glasgow-set production provides a far more affecting account of the sum of all fears. Perfect Sense is a love story set against the backdrop of a mystery virus (sound familiar?). Unlike the 2020 pandemic, this virus eats away at all your senses starting with smell, then taste, hearing and sight.
Watch it in Australia: Unfortunately, you can't stream Perfect Sense but you can rent or buy it from Google, Microsoft, YouTube or Apple.
It's not as aggressive as Lars von Trier's other film The Antichrist, but Melancholia evokes a calm resigned despair that echoes the depression of the main character Justine (Kirsten Dunst). The film has two parts; following Justine first through her disastrous wedding and then the prelude to the end of the world as a rogue planet makes a trajectory towards Earth.
Watch it in Australia: Melancholia can be streamed on Kanopy, or rent or bought from Google Play, YouTube or Microsoft.
In Requiem for a Dream, a relentless sensory assault threatens to overwhelm the viewer, but the visceral images and frantic editing capture the euphoric 'highs' and repetitive rituals of drug blighted lives while drawing clear parallels between the characters' different forms of addiction. Burnished camerawork and ex-Pop Will Eat Itself head Clint Mansell's part-punchy, part-elegiac score reinforces and counterpoints the increasingly nightmarish visuals.
Watch it in Australia: Stream it on Amazon Prime or rent or buy it from Apple TV, Google Play or YouTube.
Reverentially adapted from a ghoulish piece of Puritan folklore (much of the dialogue is lifted verbatim from 17th-century documents), The Witch is one of the most genuinely unnerving horror films in recent memory. A family of fundamentalist pilgrims is banished from their walled New England settlement and are forced to resettle in a grey stretch of field on the edge of some truly sinister woods. Soon after, tragic events begin to befall the family; whether they are supernatural or simply unfortunate is unclear to both the family and the audience.
Watch it in Australia: Stream it on Kanopy, or get it from Google, Microsoft, Apple or YouTube.
A young Jake Gyllenhaal is all glowering gothic intensity as Donnie, the wayward son of a well-to-do middle-American family who begins to suspect that his hallucinations of a giant rabbit are in fact transmissions from an apocalyptic future. A tale of adolescent mental illness and a possible end of the world scenario, backed by Gary Jules's 'Mad World' make for a film that probably won't make you weep, but will make you deeply uncomfortable.
Watch it in Australia: Stream Donnie and Frank on SBS on Demand or Kanopy, or rent or buy from Google, YouTube, Apple or Microsoft.
Eraserhead's story – if it could be described as such – concerns Henry, a lonely man who discovers that the girl he loves has carried and given birth to something that might or might not be a baby. Maybe "bleak" isn't quite the right word for the film, but it's hard to argue that with the scraping, barren soundscapes and the lightless world to which they are bound that the film isn't unsettling. Those familiar with director David Lynch's work will notice how many of his common visual cues (the chevron tiles, the lightbulbs) make their first appearances here.
Watch it in Australia: Stream it on Kanopy.
Under the Skin is set in Glasgow, the weather of which is surely enough to classify the film as bleak. The film is an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel about an alien that comes to Earth in human form with the purpose of luring men away to be deliquesced. It’s an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror with the everyday mundanity of a "woman" driving about rainy Scotland in a battered transit van.
Watch it in Australia: You can stream Under the Skin on Stan or Kanopy, or rent or buy from Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube or Microsoft.
Does anything feel a little… familiar about the return of lockdown rules in metro Melbourne? The current circumstances have got us feeling a little bit of déjà vu, so we rounded up a list of movies that feature a time loop to set the mood.
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