We know life is sad enough right now, but if you’re just a sucker for pain, or want to know what to avoid this list might be for you. Reddit is home to some of the finest critics, but even these folks said these movies were emotionally scarring to their core. With that, check these ten out (but have a box of tissues ready.)
1) ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ (1988)
There’s no better way to kickstart a list than with the emotionally crushing, hardcore cinematic body-slam that will leave you dwelling on it for weeks and weeks to come. Grave of the Fireflies written and directed by Isao Takahata, chronicles the lives of two siblings as they struggle to survive the firebombing of Kobe during World War II. Studio Ghibli has made many a film featuring whimsical creatures and adventures, but this one is on a completely different level, and for good reason. The animation is still stunning, but this is real and raw and unflinchingly devastating. A slow burn of human despair, lost innocence, and the quiet terror of being invisible to the world around you, that you’ll never want to watch twice.
2) ‘Terms of Endearment’ (1983)
Don’t let the razor wit or Jack Nicholson’s sleazy astronaut schtick fool you, Terms of Endearment is here to emotionally f-ck you up. The film chronicles the fraught relationship between a controlling, high-strung widow Aurora Greenway and her freewheeling daughter Emma, who drops her mom like a hot potato by marrying a flaky college professor named Flap and moving across the country. Decades of life away from each other allows their bond to endure distance, resentment, babies, affairs, financial ruin and Aurora’s midlife fling with her schlubby, immature next-door neighbor. The film is a hilarious, biting and achingly awkward real-life portrait of love until the third act comes out of nowhere to pick you up and slam you against the wall. Start scrolling if you don’t want to be spoiled… Emma is diagnosed with cancer, and the brash, sharp-edged world gives way to something warm, vulnerable and agonizing.
3) Hachi: A Dog’s Tale
If you thought Marley & Me was sad, Hachi: A Dog’s Tale is here to destroy you. Based on the real-life story of an Akita in 1920s Japan, this modern-day retelling stars Parker Wilson, a mild-mannered college professor who stumbles upon a stray puppy at the train station and brings him home. They fall in love. They become best friends. Well then, out of the blue, Parker dies and Hachi still shows up at the station every single day, waiting for him to come home. Not for weeks. Not for months. For years. It starts as a cutesy pet tale and quickly devolves into a silent, inexorable spiral of grief. Hachi doesn’t let go. He doesn’t understand. He just waits. Through rain and snow, through time and heartbreak, he waits. The world moves on around him, but he doesn’t. It’s tender. It’s heartbreaking, and if you make it through the end without a good cry, you’re probably not human.
4) ‘Life Is Beautiful’ (1997)
If you thought Hachi was bad, just wait until a man dances his way through fascist Italy and straight into your soul. Life Is Beautiful begins as a charming, almost slapstick love story. Guido, a Jewish waiter with bottomless optimism, falls in love with schoolteacher Dora, engaged to a government official. He wins her heart with chaos and charm, steals her from her own engagement party, and builds a life with her and their son, Giosuè. Following that, war arrives and the movies tone takes on a sharp transition. The war forces Guido and Dora along with their young son Giosuè out of their home to endure the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp. In a final act of defiance and love, Guido convinces Giosuè it’s all just a game. Every humiliation, every horror, every threat is part of the rules, and points are earned and the winner gets a tank. If he cries, complains, or asks for his mom? He loses. Guido never breaks character, not even when he’s starving. Not even when he’s marched to his death. The liberation of the camp brings Giosuè’s unwavering belief that their survival game turned into reality. This is a movie about love in the face of horror, and a father who gave everything to protect his child’s innocence.
5) ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (2005)
Twenty years ago, Brokeback Mountain hurt like hell to watch, and it still does today. Director Ang Lee brings us to Wyoming in 1963, where Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are two young ranch hands who get a summer job herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain and fall in love. What begins as something they’re both not sure how to deal with turns into a decades-long relationship that neither of them can seem to fully let go of, despite marrying women, having kids and living hundreds of miles apart. They meet in secret for years after, unable to ever truly leave each other behind. It’s not just a forbidden love story, it’s about fear, repression and the violence that comes from forced repression of love. It’s beautiful. It’s brutal. Twenty years later, it still hasn’t let go.
5) ‘Steel Magnolias’ (1989)
Want to laugh and tear yourself completely apart in the same 2 hours? Steel Magnolias has got you covered. The movie takes place in a small Louisiana town, following a group of women who spend much of their time at Truvy’s beauty salon gossiping, fighting, and caring for each other through all of life’s circumstances (and life likes to throw some curveballs). Central to the film is Shelby, a young woman living with type 1 diabetes who is determined to have a child even though it could be dangerous for her. She and her mother, M’Lynn, play off each other well until Shelby’s fierce independence finally takes a toll and then, well. It’s motherhood, sickness, a kidney transplant, and then loss. One moment you’re watching Dolly Parton tell you how to dye your hair, and the next you’re watching Sally Field deliver one of the most heartbreaking monologues of 80s cinema.
6) ‘What Dreams May Come’ (1998)
What Dreams May Come is here to ruin your life. A story about love and loss and pain, the movie centers on Chris, a doctor and loving father who loses both his children in a car accident and dies himself shortly thereafter. He awakens in his wife’s heaven, a surreal painted landscape formed by her art, and quickly discovers she is still alive… and not doing very well. After Annie dies by suicide, she descends into a hellish afterlife of her own construction, formed out of her sorrow and despair. Told by the powers that be that there is no hope of bringing her back, that people who die the way she did are beyond reach and Chris leaves anyway. Guided by two spirits (who turn out to be his children), Chris journeys through a literal hell to find Annie, and is met with someone who doesn’t even remember him. This a film about love, loss, trauma, and the afterlife that has Robin Williams giving it his all. It will be the beautiful imagery that people remember, but the story will tear you apart. Don’t be deceived by the colors.
7) ‘ The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ (2008)
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a movie centered around a child named Bruno. Ralf, Bruno’s father holds a senior Nazi position and becomes the official leader of an extermination camp in a Polish rural area under occupation. Bruno notices a farm with a barbed-wire fence from his bedroom window and proceeds to befriend a boy wearing “striped pajamas” named Shmuel, who is on the other side of the fence. Bruno sneaks away from the home to play with Shmuel without his mother’s knowledge, sneaking food over to him as the two strike up an unlikely friendship. On the eve of the family’s planned departure for Berlin, Shmuel reveals that his father has been missing for days, which Bruno promises to help him find. He strips down to his underwear, puts on a striped uniform he finds and crawls under the fence, into the camp and into Shmuel’s arms. They are soon both swept up in a roundup and disappear together into the gas chambers. One watch of this movie is all you’ll need not because it isn’t good, but because you only need to see it once to be hit with the lasting effects.
8) ‘My Dog Skip’ (2000)
If you’ve got a sweet spot for a coming-of-age tale that’s part charming, part bittersweet, My Dog Skip is for you. Set in early 1940s Mississippi, we meet lonely only child Willie Morris, an overbearing father, a loving but anxious mother, and zero friends. That is, until his mom surprises him with a Smooth Fox Terrier puppy and names him Skip. Willie and Skip become best buds:, Skip quickly becomes the town charmer, and because of his new buddy becomes popular, confident, and gets the girl of his dreams. Skip sticks by him for everything from schoolyard bullies to the return of his neighbor and childhood hero Dink, a local boy who went off to the war but comes back broken and bitter. All is not always puppies and sunshine, and Willie takes Skip for granted after he’s humiliated at baseball practice. In anger, Willie kicks Skip, who bolts and runs off into the night. Narrated through the voice of Willie’s older self, when Skip says his final farewells you’ll feel you’ve lost a friend too.
9) ‘Requiem for a Dream’ (2000)
Requiem for a Dream is one of the most harrowing depictions of addiction shown in a horror movie. Lonely Brighton Beach widow Sara Goldfarb dreams of appearing on her favorite game show. To fit into her old red dress, she turns to prescription diet pills and quickly descends into amphetamine psychosis. Her son Harry, girlfriend Marion, and best friend Tyrone are heroin users living out American dreams, until the drugs dry up and they’re forced into desperate, degrading acts. As Sara’s mind unravels, Harry loses his arm to infection, Tyrone is beaten and works in prison, and Marion becomes a sex worker to support her habit. By the end, all four are physically broken, emotionally devastated, and utterly alone. It’s relentless a film that will leave you hollow long after the credits end.
10) The Iron Claw (2023)
The Iron Claw recounts the real-life story of the Von Erich professional wrestling family whose rise to stardom in the 1970s and ’80s was tragically overshadowed by a string of devastating losses. In 1977, former pro-wrestler Fritz Von Erich gives his four youngest sons, Kevin, David, Kerry and Mike a chance to pursue a championship legacy under the ominous shadow of a “family curse” that already claimed the life of their oldest brother. As the Von Erich brothers find success in the ring, they are relentlessly met with personal tragedy. First David, the eldest of the four, dies unexpectedly while on tour in Japan. After Kerry captures the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, he loses his foot in a motorcycle crash. Mike is hospitalized with brain damage following a wrestling injury and later dies by suicide. As a husband and father, Kevin helplessly watches his brother Kerry’s ill-fated comeback in the WWF end the same way with yet another death in the family. In the aftermath, Kevin walks away from wrestling, and focuses on his wife and children.