Another voter for Lars von Trier, but this time with Bjork starring in Dancer in the Dark.
Damn that movie shattered me.
+1
God.
Glad I saw it. Don’t want to see it again.
I was going to say this one as well, but the OP said no post-apoc.
Mine would be Tess of the D’Urbervilles…Sophias Choice, and Planet of the Apes.
I’ve only read the book and not watched the film, but The Girl Next Door (not the one with Jack Bauer’s daughter; the other one) pretty much destroyed me inside for a month or so after finishing it.
Your utterance of that phrase made me think of Michelle Williams, who is gunning for Jennifer’s crown. Witness:
Meek’s Cutoff
Wendy and Lucy
Take This Waltz
Blue Valentine
Shutter Island
Brokeback Mountain
That’s a pretty good bleakness resume.
I stand corrected. As soon as I read the name Michelle Williams I knew you were right without even needing the list. Having seen most of them, it’s her. Hands down. (You even missed a few.)
Don’t wolves hunt particularly well?
Depends on your definition of well.
Hunt lemmings and other rodents well? You bet.
Hunt caribou well? That’s debatable. Well-ish, but without success more often than with.
Hunt humans wells? Give me a fucking break.
It’s not nearly as bleak as some others mentioned here but the Australian film The Square is a pretty big downer (especially the ending.)
I suppose I should contribute to this thread, and not just a hijack of it … but there have been so many good choices so far! Hard to think of anything people haven’t mentioned already …
How about No Country for Old Men? Its message (from the point of view of Tommy Lee Jones’ character) seems to be more or less that evil is overwhelming the good guys and in the end all but unstoppable.
Midnight Cowboy? End with a bus ride to hell (er, Florida) next to the corpse of the protagonist’s only friend. Yikes.
A very situational case, but… *War of the Roses *(the Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner disintegrating marriage “comedy”). It’s an unfunny, dark, bleak, gut-wrenching divorce movie posing as a black comedy. By itself, I’d find it pretty worthy of this list.
However, try watching it as your stay-home New Year’s Eve entertainment with a spouse in a marriage about to teeter over the brink, and it’s just about the blackest thing I can remember watching. It was supposed to be an evening of reconciliation and finding reasons to hang on, and it probably was the pebble that started the final avalanche.
(It was a good change in the long run but I can still pull up the seeping horror of that night.)
I saw that when it came out and I agree. I like dark comedy but I didn’t find anything comedic about that movie.
Can I ask one question? WHY? Why would you, as entertainment on a weekend that was a last-ditch effort to put things back together, watch a movie about a ridiculously bitter divorce in the first place?
If we’re going to talk about personal situation bleak…
After my dad died, I was the only one of us four kids still at home, so I wound up spending a lot more time with my mom. I took her out to the movies.
We saw All That Jazz.
Not, not, NOT a good movie-going choice for someone who just lost a charismatic workaholic.
It was poorly chosen as a “comedy” to lighten up the evening.
Well, I’m depressed just by reading the synopsis of the movies mentioned on wikipedia.
I didn’t see any of the movies listed, I think (except for Salo, but IMO, this isn’t a “bleak” movie, rather a sick one). Oh, and just remembered : I also saw the movie about a family in a small American town after a nuclear war. Oh, and “Threads” and “The road”, also mentioned.
Nevertheless, there are at least three of those listed that I want to watch : the fireflies, Irreversible and the movie about the boy in Nazi occupied Russia I forgot the title of.
Leaving to Watch “Waltz with Bachir”. I don’t expect it to be uplifting at all, but hopefully, it won’t as bad as those you guys talked about in this thread.
ETA : I had forgotten to submit the post…Just watched it. That was bleak 
yep. I saw the whole premise of the movie in the opening scene and hated the “heroine” from that point onward. Did not improve the film.
I not only loathed that film, by the end I loathed the reviewer who led me to it.