Everybody loves a nice happy finale, and we all enjoy being played by a clever twist, but sometimes an untidier and more uncomfortable resolution is inevitable.
A great movie ending has the power to completely pull the rug out from underneath us.
Beyond unexpected cinematic bombshells such as the hero finds out he’s been a ghost all along, or the disappointment that two lovers don’t stay together, or the final reveal of who is Keyser Söze, some movies floor us with a disturbing ending that haunts us long after the credits have rolled.
Such total-bummer endings sometimes pay off with a cosmic cataclysm that truly ends the world as we know it.
Others arrive at an ambiguous and unsettling non-ending, fading out on a note so bleak it feels like the world has stopped spinning.
The entire subgenre of film noir is based on the notion of unhappy consequences, and I’d argue many enduring geek favorites are, more often than not, heavily noir-ish in their own right. Whether we’re shown all-out global Armageddon or we merely end on a notably bad day for our hero, some popular and influential geek favorites contain some of the darkest and most troubling endings you’ll ever see at the movies.
Fair warning: spoilers abound, because we’re talking earth-shattering revelations like when Darth Vader taunts recent southpaw Luke that he’s his father at the cliffhanger of The Empire Strikes Back, tragic outcomes such as watching the Million Dollar Baby get paralyzed and then euthanized, and conflicting resolutions like the end of Thelma & Louise, we cheer their indomitable spirit while watching them drive off a tall cliff.
Leonard, our unreliable narrator/anti-hero, lacks the ability to form new memories and so he’s forgotten he already took revenge against the man who killed his wife. He’s doomed to repeat the same murder/rinse/forget cycle for the rest of his deluded days, guided by a false trail of uncertain evidence he himself keeps planting, and despite the “I’ve done it” tattoo he’s finally had inked over his heart. Plus, his wife is not really dead after all.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Lunatic villain’s dastardly scheme to stage a massive human sacrifice actually works. At the cue of a particularly incessant commercial jingle, millions of rigged Halloween masks are triggered by remote and the people wearing them (all of them probably children) are fried in unison by blue lasers and rendered into squishy piles of charred goo. The accompanying insects and rattlesnakes crawling and slithering out of the bodies presumably overwhelm and kill off the surviving parents, siblings and neighbors who aren’t wearing masks.
Army of Darkness (Director’s Cut)
Ash has been stuck in medieval times since Reel One. In order to get back home to present day, a little black magic is on order. In a priceless gaffe typical of our feisty but perpetually cursed hero, Ash gets distracted while dosing himself with a hibernation potion and swallows one drop too many—he naps for an extra century through the apocalypse, waking up with a big bushy beard only to find himself trapped among the crumbled ruins of futuristic London. “No! I slept too long!!!” Cut to black.
Alien³
The adrenal thrills of Aliens make me want to run out and enlist in the Colonial Marine Corps to kick some xenomorphic ass.
In contrast, the apocalyptic gloom of Alien³ is a kick to the stomach from its opening moments. The main title sequence has scarcely finished rolling and already Ripley has been impregnated by an alien while in cryo-sleep and is now stranded on a desolate prison planet, plus her two friends Newt and Dwayne who survived Aliens have been unceremoniously killed off in the crash-landing.
Throughout the film, Ripley is despised and nearly raped by a gang of cellblock thugs, shorn bald because of rampant lice, and met with the usual assortment of corporate shills and obstinate naysayers who are stalked and slaughtered in turn by the alien beastie. Poor, haggard Ripley barely gets a moment to grieve for her recently departed surrogate daughter, though she does find time to nestle with a kindly but disgraced prison doctor who is dispatched soon after zipping up.
When Ripley realizes she’s carrying a gestating queen in her belly, she tragically and heroically opts for sacrifice, but by the time Ripley takes her climactic Nestea Plunge into that vat of molten lead, I felt so depressed and gutted I wanted to curl up like a fetus and die.
No, Alien³ was hardly a franchise-killer after all, but this one definitely feels like the end of the world as we know it.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Man investigating a missing girl in a secluded Scottish island village may be onto something sinister after all, possibly even witchcraft. Last seen burning alive while tied to a giant flaming pyre.
Knowing
A father discovers his son has premonitions of terrible disasters. Turns out, the end of the world is nigh. Very nigh. Shortly before a massive solar flare incinerates the planet, aliens whisk off with the boy and other specially selected psychics to a safe new world, ostensibly to repopulate the human race. In the blink of an eye, the rest of us remaining on Earth are toast.
The Tenant
Yes, your creepy and nosy new neighbors really are trying to drive you insane. One of Roman Polanski’s most demented offerings, filmed in Paris just after Chinatown (which also contains a doozy of a downer ending), Polanski casts himself as the doomed anti-hero, a shy wimp who moves into an old apartment recently vacated by a woman who jumped out the window. He begins to suspect the neighbors made her do it, and fears they’re conspiring to urge him to do likewise.
The filmmaker was doubtlessly still reeling from the real-life Manson murder of pregnant Sharon Tate in 1969 and, in the interim, fresh on the run from U.S. authorities over charges of statutory rape. It’s hard to divorce the influence of that horrific reality from the psychosexual undercurrents of Polanski’s films, which makes the sheer unhinged madness of this lesser-known cult flick seem all the more personal and surreal…and makes for a shocking ending that’s one to die for.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Whoops, apocalypse! To lighten the bleak mood of imminent nuclear winter, Stanley Kubrick originally intended for his darkly comic cautionary tale to end with a slapstick pie fight in the War Room. With or without the coconut cream, the closing sequence of mushroom clouds lighting up multiple horizons is among filmdom’s biggest and most indelible “That’s all, folks!” moments.
Se7en
When the hero vanquishes the villain, it usually signifies victory. Things aren’t so cut-and-dry in David Fincher’s seminal seven-deadly-sins serial-killer thriller. When Brad Pitt realizes what’s in the box, there’s no restraining his fury—but in dispatching the bad guy, our hero nonetheless fails by fulfilling the villain’s grisly scheme. The hero detective is reduced to a criminal, devastated over the death of his pregnant wife, and last viewed sitting catatonic—and presumably handcuffed—in the back seat of a police cruiser. On the upside, his sage partner decides he isn’t too old for the job after all and promptly cancels his retirement.
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Steven Spielberg’s cybernetic update of “Pinocchio” teases us with a perfectly ambiguous non-ending: boy robot David gets trapped underwater beneath a toppled Ferris wheel. He spends eternity staring out at a carnival statue he thinks is the Blue Fairy, pleading for her to make him a real boy. Fade out.
You wish. Instead, we dissolve to thousands of years later, where strange beings—Are they aliens? Sentient machines?—are excavating Manhattan out of the frozen terrain and discover David, still “alive.” They have the power and technology to read his thoughts and reincarnate David’s long-dead human mother from a saved lock of her hair—the catch is, she can come back for only one day (never mind the other few billion cells still residing in the remains of her hair leftover from the cloning procedure…unless, of course, they blew the entire wad of hair on their first try). David’s wish to become a real boy with a mother who loves him is technically never granted—bummer!—but during that one magical day, David and a confused clone of his human mom share a lifetime of connectedness.
Then David gets to watch her fall asleep forever, and then apparently wills himself to shut down and die by her side. Poor sentient toy bear Teddy, still operating on everlasting batteries, will evidently spend the rest of his unending days trapped in a bedroom with two corpses.
Brazil
At the end of Terry Gilliam’s macabre Orwellian satire, our hero Sam has been captured by the fascist apparatus and a daring jailbreak ensues. In reality, the damsel-in-distress Sam has spent much of the film fantasizing about and attempting to save is officially dead, and the anarchist sidekick who’s come to Sam’s rescue has probably already been liquidated. In a final fantastical fury of hallucination, we realize our smiling hero has been completely lobotomized during interrogation by agents of the apparatus, strapped into a chair and lost in perpetual delirium but—and this is the only hint of a hopeful, happy ending for Sam—blissfully oblivious and impervious to their mental and physical tortures.
The End.
