Grittiest movie you've ever seen

Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future which just opened on Hulu is right up there.

Ladybird, Ladybird.

Bastard out of Carolina.

Irreversible.

A Serbian Film.

Dead or Alive.

Ichi the Killer.

Fitzcarraldo

"Desperate Living" (1977)- Mortville looked like hell on earth.

Midnight Cowboy

That Romanian abortion film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Or the other crazy Romanian one about the nuns 'Beyond the Hills'.

Never want to go anywhere near there after watching those.

Chopper with Eric Bana about an Australian organized-crime leader.

Bana is absolutely incredible--his best acting, IMHO

A movie called " Buster and Billie". It came out in the early 1970's. Jan Michael Vincent played the lead. I forget what the female leads name was. I've never saw her her in anything else. Its a tragic love story, that takes place in South Carolina ( I believe). He plays a high school kid in the 1940's who falls in love with a girl whose poor nd trashy. She's also a whore. He falls in love with her. The ending gets me every time. It has a gritty but realistic look to it.

The Piano Teacher

"Dancer in the Dark" (and yes, it is a musical). Actually, pretty much all of Lars von Trier's oeuvre fits this thread...

Who Killed Teddy Bear?

The Honeymoon Killers

Bad Lieutenant

I saw "Christiane F" when I was a teen in a flyover suburb. I knew it was based on a true story about kids my age and the movie seemed like a documentary to me, including David Bowie as himself. I had seen "Dawn" and "Alexander," but they were like after-school special compared to "Christiane." It really shook me up in a way similar movies that I saw when I was less naive didn't.

Dancer in the Dark would leave the happy wanderer suicidal

R9 Michel Haneke specialises in films that make you wonder why the fuck do I get out of bed

Like Gary Oldman, Tim Roth directed a very bleak and gritty family drama, ""The War Zone." Watch at your peril. I did think Tilda Swinton was miscast.

Son of Saul - about a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, who were Jews forced to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. It takes place at Auschwitz and follows Saul for a day and a half tending to his grim work.

It ruined me for days.

Last Exit to Brooklyn. Unlike Midnight Cowboiy, it has no compelling or enjoyable parts making it sonething you want to see again. Great perfomances and production just a total downer.

Surely Requiem for a Dream is the darkest piece of misery imaginable?

Seven Beauties (a bleak piece of gallows humor from Lina Wertmuller from from the mid 1970s)

William Friedkin's Sorcerer (and Wages of Fear, the French film it was based on)

And speaking of Friedkin - the grimy French Connection

City of Angels

The Long Good Friday

Salo

Escape: 2000 (Mystery Science Theater 3000)

Space Mutiny (Mystery Science Theater 3000)

Blood In, Blood Out

Any Kirk Cameron movie, they're enough to make you want to kill yourself

Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer

Three Australian crime dramas:

Snowtown

The Boys

Redball

By Gaspar Noé, maker of R2's Irreversible, Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone).

What happens when there's no work for a crazed horse meat butcher who ends up with little left to lose? Except, possibly, his feeble daughter he sprung from the boobyhatch. Shows a reeking underbelly of France I hope Rick Steves never covers.

[...]

The haunting with Julie Christie

R24. No 'Wake in Fright' on your list?

Had to leave the room during the kangaroo hunt. Grim doesn't begin to describe that movie.

The Argentinean film Plata Quemada (Burnt Money). I loved it, but everything looked grimy and covered with a sheen of sweat or other moisture.

Apocalypse Now. It haunted me for days afterward.

Most Ulrich Seidl films would leave you chilled to the bone. So depressing

R19, I'd forgotten about Wages of Fear! You have brought back memories of watching it with my father on a tiny plastic black & white TV.

Gardens of the Night

Dancer in the Dark makes Requiem for a Dream look like a Disney movie. I've watched Requiem several times, Dancer I could only watch once.

For me, it’s The Deer Hunter. Grim, so very grim.

King Rat

Lars von Trier, Idioten

Swiss family Robinson

Pixote

Plunge my pussy

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Breaking the waves

Irreversible

Naked

Flesh, Heat, and Trash by Andy Warhol

The Panic in Needle Park

Enter the Void

I love movies of the 70s and early 80s for this reason so many of them have this gritty appearance. Films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Cruising and even Fame

Chu Chu and the Philly Flash

Mona Lisa

Wish You Were Here

A lot of the kitchen sink British films of the 60s:

The Servant

The Entertainer

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

A Kind of Loving

This Sporting Life

Also:

A Hatful of Rain

R35 for me, THE DEER HUNTER has always been impossible to finish--not because it's depressing, but because it's too fucking long and boring.

The L Shaped Room

Anything Ken Loach

DONNIE DARKO

TRAS EL CRISTAL

SECONDS (by Frankenheimer, w/ Rock Hudson)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

and agree about DANCER IN THE DARK (Ugh.)

Taxi Driver, without a doubt.

Out of the Blue with Dennis Hopper

Speaking of Hopper:

Blue Velvet is pretty gritty

TWIST, a chilly urban Canadian misery-indie 2000s adaptation of the Dickens novel.

Nick Stahl plays the expy character of the Artful Dodger, so...you kind of know tonally what to expect. It's not high-concept, but it does hurt. Everyone looks freezing cold to the bone, everyone is sick and traumatised and hungry, almost everyone is trying to grift everyone else. The slide into bleak hopelessness is so slow and pernicious but also so clear that it's just agonising, a trudge through a modern wasteland of abuse and crime and poverty and wasteful death.

Once were warrior's. About a family in New Zealand. Rena Owen and Temuera Morrison, plays her Husband. The have 5 kids, they party constantly and they're poor. Its unforgettable. Especially Rena Owens performance.

Frozen

My film geek sister shows me Nil By Mouth when we were teens. That IS a brutal movie, Op.

The grittiest film I've seen is a Russian war movie called Come and See, which my sister also made me watch when we were teens.

Once Were Warriors. I could only watch it once.

[quote] I saw "Christiane F" when I was a teen in a flyover suburb

binged watched that one with the gang back in the early 80s. We were 10 yo or so. Parents free. they would leave us in front of "the sound of music" or any such shit , but we would swiftly open the videotapes cupboard and slip this one in the VCR, on repeat. And "the graduate" too. UNsuprisingly, I've become the slut of all time.

Faces by Cassavetes

I would say taxi driver and cape fear. I really resented de niro and scorcese after that. never watched any of their movies again. still angry

Meet the fockers

the boat

r54 I must have blocked that one out my mind because I'd forgotten about it. The depiction of domestic violence was brutal.

Sobibor. A Russian film released in the last few years. It gives the most haunting depiction of the Holocaust I have ever seen.

Babette's feast. that was hard to take

The Last House on the Left

I Spit on Your Grave

The Devil's Rejects

The cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in particular:

Ali Fear Eats the Soul

In a Year of 13 Moons

My depression has been coming back worse of late, so I'm saluting you chappers and reversing slowly out of the thread.

Gomorra the movie. The series is more operatic. I love them both.

The Mare Winningham TV movie God Bless the Child. Heartbreaking.

Caged. Eleanor Parker is brilliant but I’ve only seen it once and wanted to slit my own throat afterwards.

Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl. Brilliant, soul-destroying.

"Panic in Needle Park". I don't remember why I didn't change the channel, I think I was stuck in a hotel room with nothing but reality TV on the other cable channels.

Did anyone ever pay money to see that horror?

R2 is right, Bastard Out of Carolina.

Another one is If...

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

Breaking the Waves

Nil by Mouth

The War Zone

The Boys

Requiem for a Dream

Also, a Danish TV series called 1864 made in 2014 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Denmark being pounded by Bismarck's Prussia in a war the Danes had no chance of winning.

True Grit?

BARFLY

I love Our Faye, but it really wants me to take a shower.

[quote]r27 The haunting with Julie Christie

You know what? Fuck you. [italic]FUCK YOU,[/italic] r27!

When I was a teen I rented 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' and it was a lot grittier than I was expecting. I haven't watched it since then, but I assume I am a lot more jaded now so it probably wouldn't effect me that much.

Gangs of New York

from Bryan Forbes director of the aforementioned King Rat and The L-Shaped Room

Well hell, I'm adding On the Bowery but evidently many of the films cited here make this one seem tame.

Dancer in the Dark was so ridiculous i could not take it seriously. it's very clear when you see it that the director/writer/auteur has never in his entire life been to the United States. My friend and I took a campy pleasure in seeing how ridiculous horrible circumstances become for the central character (Bjork!), especially given that it's a musical!

"Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster" (1964) - oh, the humanity!

I call them "shower movies." The Deer Hunter, Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Natural Born Killers are tops on my list.

"The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three" is not really grim, but it is gritty.

First film that came to mind:

SNOWTOWN (2011) -- An absolutely delightful wallow in violence, homophobia, incest, torture, and animal brutality. It's one of the few films that I felt I needed to take a shower after watching.

[quote] Wish You Were Here

Really? I thought it was quite uplifting.

True Grit

A lot of the snuffers I worked on when I was living in

Oh.

Never mind.

Last House on Dead End Street (1977)—looks and feels like home movies shot by the Manson family. A repugnant but powerful film.

Some good films mentioned above. I'd second Gomorrah, it was appalling but riveting. Also Elephant, a 40 minute TV movie from 1989 and the inspiration for Gus van Sant's movie.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Full metal Jacket. That movie still messes with me.

Deliverance. Horrifying but Bert Reynolds was gorgeous.

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

Any of the various films about Unit 731, for example, Men Behind the Sun (1988), etc. Horrifying because it actually happened.

I'd love to see one about Paraguay the kind of dysfunction in which a society sacrifices a large majority of its male population in an unwinnable war.

When it turned up on TV, it was “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.“

The trap was baited with a fancy middle class atmosphere and a real actress around my age - an antidote to Mason Reese.

[quote]r87 True Grit

Turned down by DL icon Tuesday Weld, of course. Along with everything else.

Weld turned down the opportunity to play Mattie Ross opposite John Wayne in the 1969 film True Grit. Kim Darby played the part.

R86 you’re right, it’s uplifting but I find the look of the movie quite gritty still.

Shoah (1985)

A masterpiece done by Claude Lanzmann.

The film is concerned chiefly with four topics: the Chełmno extermination camp, where mobile gas vans were first used by Germans to exterminate Jews; the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the Warsaw ghetto, with testimonies from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators. Shoah took eleven years to make. It was plagued by financial problems, difficulties tracking down interviewees, and threats to Lanzmann's life.

Man of Steel

I’m sure someone has already mentioned it, but I’d say “Come and See,” about a young White Russian partisan caught behind enemy lines when the Einsatztruppen arrive.

Leaving Las Vegas.

Papillion.

Philomena.

Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

R103 I never got the buzz or horror for that film. Found it kinda uninvolving.

"UNsuprisingly, I've become the slut of all time."

I had no idea The Sound of Music could do that to somebody.

Although I think then entire Bel Ami ouvre is based on somebody's fixation with Rolf.

Naked

Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow. Not gritty in the contemporary way but heart-breaking beyond description.

I’m not sure I know what gritty means.

For R110 - "showing something unpleasant as it really is; uncompromising"

Then I’m gonna go with Saw or Hostel.

“Kes” by Ken Loach from 1969. A bleak portrayal of a working class boy in Northern England who befriends a kestrel.

Last House on the Left is gritty and very tough to watch. Even the terrible comic relief scenes feel eerie and uncomfortable.

Martyrs is another one. I had to take an hour long shower after seeing that.

If we're allowing TV fare, much of the first season of [italic]Carnivàle[/italic] where it was set in the Dust Bowl and a dilapidated traveling circus. At one point I joked about Nick Stahl's character being thrown to the ground and disappearing because all the dirt he was covered in blended seamlessly with it.

As the series went on there were more dream sequences and other flights of fancy that were more baroque instead of naturalistic, but at the start it really felt like you were among the downtrodden in poverty-stricken Depression Era middle America.

The Golden Glove. 2019 film based on a true story of a serial killer in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn neighborhood on the 1970’s. Brutal but amazing film.

R109, also the basis for Ozu's Tokyo Story.

R116 thanks for the tip. I love me some Reeperbahn seaminess.

Sling Blade.

Eastern Promises.

Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. In a bleak winter Canadian landscape a school bus full of children plunges down a hillside onto a frozen lake, breaking the ice and drowning all but a few on board, including the two children of a man following behind the bus by truck observing all that happens. A vicious shark of a lawyer comes to town, with a heartbreaking backstory of his own, to rally the anger of the parents and find someone to pay for what happened. One of the few survivors, now confined to a wheelchair and no longer of interest to her dad who was having an incestuous relationship with her is the moral center of the town, and is played by Sarah Polley in a career defining performance.

^Yes, The Sweet Hereafter, laughably dreary, just fucking awful. I got convinced by someone to go see that in a theater. A perfect waste of 2 hours.

R120 Spoilers, cunt.

R121 The scene with Ian Holm carrying his daughter in the car after the spider bite is seared in my memory.

Cannibal Holocaust

The Poughkeepsie Tapes

Megan Is Missing

Larry Clark's "Bully". It's worse than "Kids".

I went to law school because of The Sweet Hereafter.

I liked the director's cut of "A Serbian Film."

The restored outtakes and bloopers also add to the impact of the themes.

Gritty, with a splash of a little more.

Bully

The Piano Teacher

An American Crime (UGH)

Scum

Angst

Snowtown

Bastard Out Of Carolina (had forgotten that one)

The Earthling

And many others that I’ve thankfully forgotten.

Oh, and one more:

The Crying Game

[quote] Gangs of New York

That movie should have been even grittier, but it would have removed the entire premise. Realistically, the Daniel Day Lewis character would have killed the Leo DiCaprio character when he was a young boy. (Like how Vito Corleone, as a boy, was hunted down in Italy.)

The DDL character definitely had the opportunity to kill the Leo (as a boy) character, but, instead, allows him to grow up into a man. Then, he tries to kill him. Doesn't make sense.

There Will Be Blood. The Paul Dano character really creeped me out, yet it was a very realistic character.

I saw Dancer in the Dark and Requiem for a Dream. They both are unforgettable and made me feel the misery. I guess that is the goal. When I saw those movies I was okay with that. To be taken down a bleak path for a bit to hear the story. I don't feel like doing that now. I just don't need that energy. There's enough misery in real life every day. Seeing it depicted on the big screen is just too much for me right now. I'm not in that place. Scary movies or thrillers with violence is still ok. I remember coming out of Dancer in the Dark and said if you locked 10 writers in a room for 10 years to write the saddest movie ever told, that would be it. Fuck that movie.

Let Me Die a Woman and no, it's not the story of Bruce Jenner

The Pianist. Traumatizing.

A Greek movie called Landscape in the Mist about a young brother and sister who set off on what the viewer already knows is a futile journey to find their father and terrible, terrible things happen to them along the way. In this scene in the snowy streets a dying horse is dragged by a tractor and abandoned and the kids come to its aid as it slowly expires. I have no idea how they shot this scene and obviously done in one take, and it’s not the worst thing that happen to them. One of the few, good caring people they meet is a hot young gay motorcycle guy who helps them and the sister falls in love with. There’s are also stunning images of surreal beauty that contrast the brutality as well. A remarkable movie.

Paris Is Burning.

City Of God.

One False Move

American Gangster.

The Siege.

[quote] To be taken down a bleak path for a bit to hear the story. I don't feel like doing that now. I just don't need that energy. There's enough misery in real life every day.

You can always do a crystal cleanse after

Threads, the 1984 British film about the effects of a nuclear holocaust.

If we include documentaries then the grittiest documentary I know is Hommes a louer, about rough trade in Montreal. It is gritty about the human condition. It has gritty cinematography and of course it is in Quebecois French, so the French is achingly gritty. The mix of young male beauty, but already mostly destroyed, Montreal looking like a dark and garish hellhole, and gorgeous French, destroyed by the low class + quebecois inflections, is poetic yet heartbreaking.

I just recently watched "Snowtown" based on the Australian Snowtown murders in the 90s. The thing is...there isn't really anything out of the ordinary for a movie based on an infamous murder case. There was the prerequisite “charming”--yet sociopathic leader, super-grisly murders, hate crimes, etc. BUT I guess because of the personal connections b/t the murderers and the victims, the poverty, lost innocents blah blah, this movie felt particularly gloomy. I liked it tho.

At one point I was like…”WHY do I watch this shit?”

Life for Ruth is pretty gritty. Not to mention the father played by DL fave Michael Craig is a monster of selfishness blindly following his religion and not seeming to care how it impacts those around him and the sacrifices they make for him and his stupid views. Plus when all is said and done he almost ends things in another selfish way which would have inflicted even more trauma on all of those who witnessed it not to mention his friends and family… gritty kitchen sink drama.

R141 I hated that they showed the snake eating a mouse. So unnecessary really. Couldn’t they just allude to it. So unwatchable for me.

R143 We ALL need metaphors to understand the world!!

Dragged Across Concrete.

Dragged Across Concrete.

^LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST by Angelopoulos is an incredible movie. It won awards in Europe and an Academy Award in the US. It's hard to understand why Angelopoulos didn't become more famous in the US. This one is a real masterpiece, and he made many other great films.

1988 45th Venice International Film Festival OCIC Award 1989 2nd European Film Awards Best Film 39th Berlin International Film Festival InterFilm Award 1990 62nd Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film

^^^ I agree, based on Landscape it’s hard to believe he didn’t become a bigger international director and have other recognized masterpieces.

French miserabilism at its finest:

Bruno Dumont's L'HUMANITE and LA VIE DE JESUS.

Alain Guiraudie's STAYING VERTCAL.

Anything by the Dardenne Brothers, especially ROSETTA and LA PROMESSE.

Patrice Chereau's L'HOMME BLESSE/THE WOUNDED MAN.

These movies look like they were processed in a bath of shit and piss.

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"

THE MACHINIST: Christian Bale starved himself down to about 92 pounds, so he could play a psycho factory guy, gradually losing his mind, in one of the dreariest movies I ever watched. It's got a trick ending too, which really heightens the irritation.

Hitchcock's FRENZY was his scuzziest flick. And London in the early 70s looked like shit.

Vagabond (1985). A French drama film directed by Agnès Varda, featuring Sandrine Bonnaire. It tells the story of a young woman, a vagabond, who wanders through the Languedoc-Roussillon wine country one winter. We know from the start the woman is dead and the film presents her year in flashback. We see all the chances she has to survive and the bad choices she makes or fate deals her. So sad.

Who Can Kill A Child?

Pan's Labyrinth

The Mist (2007)

Not so much depressing as gory, dreary, oppressive and a bit nauseating--the animated space vignettes of HEAVY METAL.

It's meant to be lurid and fantastical action sci-fi with moments of comedy and sexiness, but it comes off more as unhinged and nihilistic.

Eden Lake…hopeless and depressing

Blue Valentine

Requiem for a Dream

Last Exit to Brooklyn

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

Diane Keaton's apartment and family home were so depressing that her murder seemed like euthanasia.

I just finished watching “Fiend Without A Face” on Svengoolie. It was truer grit than “True Grit”.

Midnight Express

Nobody’s mentioned Precious

R163 I STILL haven't watched "Precious" despite receiving a bootlegged copy a hundred years ago. I've been warned by people who know me. I have seen the Mo'nique/Mariah Carey scene that she won the Oscar for and it was a gut punch.

I was strong armed into seeing Precious and I did not like it, catharsis came from a critic (Ed Gonzalez, I think) who called it a "beautifully acted piece of trash", and 30 Rock who spoofed the title; "Hard to Watch: Based on the Book 'Stone Cold Bummer' by Manipulate"

R165 Good 'ole 30 Rock.

R158 While not a great movie, Eden Lake is one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen, moreso because it repeatedly gives the viewer hope and then snatches it away.

Artfully gritty and dark, with gorgeous cinematography:

Cracks— with Eva Green and Juno Temple

Bros.

Truly the most miserable movie committed to celluloid.

The Hills Have Eyes. One of the most repugnant movies I've ever seen.

The War Zone