You Want It Darker

I received this assignment after remarking, “These aren’t bleak!” in response to the Hollywood Theatre’s Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair. I now see that I overreacted. Any venue that can sell out a screening of The Turin Horse—nearly three hours of people eating raw potatoes in the dark while their horse dies—must be respected for its commitment to the bit. Still, I maintain that some of the Bleak Week films would be better shelved under “shocking” or “sad” rather than “bleak,” a label that should be reserved for movies that leave you feeling, as the credits roll, that the whole human experiment was a mistake. These do the trick. If the Hollywood selects any for next year, I promise to sit through them.

Winter Light (1963)

Ingmar Bergman’s spin on the “doubting cleric realizes he isn’t doing any good” genre, a tradition that stretches from Diary of a Country Priest to First Reformed but never got more hopeless than this. Imagine “Eleanor Rigby” sung slowly in Swedish.

Bad Timing (1980)

Three words: Art Garfunkel, rapist.

When the Wind Blows (1986)

The same nuclear radiation poisoning as Threads, but applied to a pair of cartoon pensioners who look like Ziggy. Like the first five minutes of Up, but World War III happens to both of them.

A Short Film About Killing (1988)

Krzysztof Kieślowski made a devastating argument against the death penalty for Polish television in Dekalog, then expanded it to give us another 27 minutes with the condemned man. I’m getting upset just typing this.

The Vanishing (1988)

A Dutch missing-person thriller in which a man can only find out what happened to his kidnapped girlfriend if he agrees to “share the exact same experience.” Twisted in a way that you want to take a flamethrower to the print to cleanse the vibes.

The Rapture (1991)

Basically, it’s the Left Behind series if it were made by a fervent doubter, which means it considers the possibilities that (a) the Last Judgment is literally real, and (b) the judge is crooked.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

A lot of snowy Russell Banks adaptations to choose from—I almost picked Affliction—but let’s go with the one where the snow causes all the town’s children to die in a school bus crash.

Elephant (2003)

A hometown entry from Gus Van Sant, which clinically observes the darkest of American subjects—a school shooting—then turns up the pain dial for an ending so dire the camera backs away.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)

Sidney Lumet directs Philip Seymour Hoffman as a high-functioning addict who plots a crime that destroys his family. It would be dark enough if we didn’t know what happened to Hoffman. But we do.