The 25 most devastating endings in film history

Over four decades ago, Peter Weir devastated audiences worldwide with the final scene of his World War I masterpiece, "Gallipoli." It takes courage to do this to moviegoers. "It's a great movie, but the ending is too sad to bear" is a mixed bag when it comes to word-of-mouth - which is why classic tearjerkers like "Titanic", "Terms of Endearment" and "The Iron Giant" end on moments of hope. The twenty-five movies on this list eschew such half-measures. They go hard. They leave you battered, if not completely broken. So pull out a box of tissues, and let's relive some of the most traumatizing endings of all time. (Mega-spoilers ahead, obviously.)

Peter Weir’s World War I drama follows a pair of Australian sprinters (played by Mark Lee and Mel Gibson) who join the Australian Army during the height of World War I. In classic Weir fashion, the narrative unfolds at an unhurried pace, allowing the friendship to grow naturally out of nuanced rather than contrived moments - which makes the finale that much harder to take. The almost saintly Lee cedes his role as message runner to Gibson, meaning the latter will be spared the suicıde charge through No Man’s Land. Gibson realizes the operation is sure to be a disaster and winds up with orders to cancel the assault. Due to compromised communications, he must run his tail off to save his faster friend. As he does in their opening foot race, he falls just short. The final shot will stay with you forever.

An elderly, retired couple, Shūkichi (Chishū Ryū) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) travels to the big city to visit their adult children, only to discover no one has the time or space to deal with them. Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpiece plays at first as a quiet satire of modern life, but as the grandparents are passed from family to family, it becomes a heartbreaking meditation on ageism and, well, the certitude of death. When Tomi dies, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), the widowed daughter-in-law of their middle son, offers to take care of Shūkichi. Shūkichi, however, is adamant that Noriko returns to Tokyo to resume her life; thus, the old man is left to spend his waning days in solitude, watching the boats pass on the river, and waiting for his time to die.

Brian De Palma’s paranoid political thriller stars John Travolta as a harried B-movie soundman who accidentally captures what he believes to be the assassination of a presidential candidate on audio. He’s supposed to be hunting down a “great scream” for the schlocky slasher film that’s paying his bills but instead devotes his considerable skills to proving that someone shot out the politician’s car tire. Travolta enlists the aid of Nancy Allen, who plays the prostitute hired to scandalize the candidate, to catch the killer. Travolta’s anguished search for the truth falls short, but he does get his scream.

It’s not the execution of the three soldiers for trumped-up charges of cowardice, though that stings plenty (especially when they rouse the addled Arnaud so that he is aware of his impending death), but the final scene in the tavern, where a frightened young German woman is bullied into singing for a roomful of drunken French infantrymen. She somehow summons the strength to belt her song over the catcalls of the soldiers. The tune is “The Faithful Hussar”, and it shames the men first into silence, then into a tearful hum-a-long. Kirk Douglas, their commanding officer, listens dolefully outside as he’s informed that the men are to return to the front the following day. He opts not to inform them. Let them be human today. Tomorrow, they’ll be hamburger.

Bob Fosse’s film about the tragically brief life of model/actress Dorothy Stratten sparked controversy for its unflinching depiction of the Playboy Playmate’s murder at the hands of her maniacally possessive ex-husband Paul Snider. Fosse indicts all of the men in Stratten’s life for exploiting her girl-next-door sweetness (effortlessly evoked by a brilliant Mariel Hemingway), but he’s especially fascinated with Snider (Eric Roberts), an unctuous pimp who viewed the Vancouver teenager as his ticket to showbiz glory. When Snider’s shoved aside by big-time players like Hugh Hefner and a director character based on Peter Bogdanovich, he goes berserk. If this total failure of a human being can’t have Stratten, no one can. The last ten minutes of “Star 80” drag the viewer straight to hell. “You’ll never forget Paul Snider.” In the end, he’s the only person who got what they wanted, and this will never stop stinging.

“The Day After”, “Testament” and “Threads” were all released within a year of each other in the mid-’80s during a renewed nuclear war panic brought on by saber-rattling between the hawkish Reagan administration and a rudderless Soviet Union. These movies were intended to scare the general public into phoning up their representatives to demand nuclear disarmament, and they did the trick. The desolate finale of “The Day After”, wherein John Lithgow fails to raise survivors via ham radio, forced Reagan to negotiate with the USSR’s newly appointed Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev. The ending of “Testament” finds Jane Alexander, dying of radiation sickness, celebrating what is sure to be her oldest son’s last birthday. And then there’s “Threads”, which concludes with… nope, can’t even type it!

David Kahane’s tears don’t lie! Vittorio de Sica’s Italian neorealist classic is a crushing tragedy of poverty in which a struggling father loses his ability to support his family when his bicycle is stolen. He scours the streets of Rome with his young son, hoping to recover his means of transportation. When all hope is seemingly lost, the man gives in to desperation and swipes an unattended bike. He is chased down and manhandled in front of his child, who bawls at the sight of his father’s public shame. No charges are pressed, but, as the pair walk off into the Rome evening, their future is grim.

Turns out “Eyes Wide Shut” was Stanley Kubrick’s penultimate gift to cinema. His final masterpiece: getting Steven Spielberg to acknowledge his own mortality. The ending of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” has been derided for decades by some as a shoehorned, feel-good finale that flies in the face of Kubrick’s dour sensibilities. We know now - actually, we knew then - that the film’s quasi-nightmarish fourth act is the post-apocalyptic granting of a wish from one robotic species to another. David’s final day with the memory of his mother is a heartbreaking moment, even though the hearts involved in bringing it about ceased to beat a long time ago. David is essentially euthanized, leaving his loyal companion, Teddy, all alone on his master’s deathbed.

It’s hard to beat “The Fly” (1958) when it comes to grim finales , but director Kurt Neumann makes sure to send his audience off with a cautiously optimistic denouement. David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake concludes in a mess of grief and gore. Jeff Goldblum’s madly ambitious scientist attempts to create “the ultimate family” by teleporting himself along with his pregnant girlfriend (Geena Davis), but his plans are thwarted, leaving him a disgusting hybrid of flesh and teleporter. His final gesture is to reach out to the barrel of Davis’s shotgun and aim it at his head. Davis grants his final wish.

An American photographer and a Russian woman light out to the desert non-paradise of the title for a weekend of carnal bliss. They don’t get along well, which may be due to their inability to speak the other’s language. If you can get on French director Bruno Dumont’s wavelength, this is a transfixing ninety-minute tone poem about the emptiness of lust. The film, however, is 119 minutes, and when it veers… lordy. Dumont harbors such a dim view of humanity in general that the violence visited on the photographer over the last stretch of the movie - by a pack of sadistic rednecks - is almost numbing, but he copes with his trauma with the most repugnant act imaginable. Most viewers tap out of the movie before the end, but if you stay in the saddle it’ll leave you bruised for life.

“He has his father’s eyes.” Rosemary Woodhouse’s worst fears are realized: the tenants in her apartment building (New York City’s legendary Dakota) really are Satanists, and, yep, her newborn baby is the spawn of Old Scratch. The ending stunned audiences in 1968, and, thanks to the creative telepathy between Roman Polanski and Mia Farrow, it’s lost none of its power fifty-three years later.

The enfants terrible at Cahiers du Cinéma were a boon to film discourse and, at times, infuriatingly full of shıt. François Truffaut’s claim that “every war film ends up being pro-war” is a prime example: consider every war film on this list, starting with this pulverizing WWI all-timer from Lewis Milestone, which drives home both the futility of war and duty; just because you’re called to serve by your country doesn’t mean the mission is worthy of your headstone. The final shot of Milestone’s movie finds our good-hearted protagonist whimsically reaching out from his trench to a butterfly. This innocent gesture earns him a bullet through the skull. And so it dreadfully goes.

The title to this Depression-era soul-crusher is a real kick in the teeth. Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin star as participants in a dance marathon that will allegedly award the last standing partners $1,500. Everyone is prepared to dance to exhaustion or die. When Fonda and Sarrazin learn that undisclosed deductions will leave them with virtually nothing, they quit the contest. A wholly defeated Fonda talks Serrazin into blowing her head off with a pistol. It ain’t subtle, but desperate times aren’t exactly the stuff of understatement.

Richard Brooks was in his sixties when he tackled Judith Rossner’s novel about a schoolteacher’s search for companionship in seedy singles bars, and his scolding tone is all wrong for what should be a deep-tissue character study. Diane Keaton is nevertheless excellent in the lead role, earning our sympathies despite Brooks’s seeming distaste for the character, and this allows her final, fatal hook-up (with a young Tom Berenger) to land with pulverizing force.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s World War II drama is a testament to the cunning and, above all, courage of French Resistance fighters. These men and women are fearless in the face of certain death and resilient when all appears to be lost. Melville employs the existential thriller thematics of his crime masterpieces “Bob le flambeur”, “Le Samouraï” and “Le Circle rouge”, but the job here, while ugly, is undeniably righteous - which makes the ultimate fate of our heroes so unshakably sad. After they’re forced to execute one of their own, we learn from the postscript that none of these individuals lived to see the end of the war. The brave are almost always doomed.

The power of Steve De Jarnatt’s “Miracle Mile” is in no way diminished by knowing which way its “Twilight Zone” premise is going to break. It’s fifty-fifty the nuclear apocalypse is nigh; he’s either going to be right and perish or be wrong and go to jail for inciting mass panic. All that matters to Edwards is salvaging his budding romance with a diner waitress (Mare Winningham). The final scene finds the reunited lovers trapped in the La Brea tar pits. As they sink to their deaths, Edwards tells her they could be metamorphosed into diamonds. Fade to black.

The groundbreaking horror film that kicked off the zombie craze that, for better or worse, endures to this day did much more than push the late-’60s envelope in terms of graphic violence. It gave us the character of Ben (Duane Johnson), a black man who saves and protects the ostensible white female protagonist Barbra (Judith O’Dea). Ben is the level-headed, take-charge leader of the thrown-together contingent besieged by the undead, and his reward for having survived the night is to get shot dead by a band of Pennsylvania rednecks (who’ve mistaken him for a zombie). It’s a loaded finale that leaves a deep bruise no matter how many times you’ve seen it.

“We all complete.” Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian sci-fi novel imagined a future in which clones are born, raised, and schooled only to have their organs harvested once they reach young adulthood. Director Mark Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland turned this premise into an emotional wrecking ball with this bafflingly discarded masterpiece starring Andrew Garfield, Kiera Knightley, and Carey Mulligan. You want to believe that this trio can escape their pre-programmed circumstances, but, despite their capacity to feel every human emotion, we eventually learn that their education has been a complete farce. There’s nothing out there for them other than the gift of their loins. All they are is meat on a slab. 

Robert Bresson’s “Mouchette” is the definitive study of human misery brought upon by society’s various ills. The master filmmaker uses the plight of a young peasant girl to highlight the ways in which humanity fails, if not outright punishes its most vulnerable simply because they lack the guile or cruelty to tend solely to their self-interest. And yet Bresson’s movie is anything but a wallow, which makes the title character’s decision to take her life by clumsily rolling into a river all the more heartbreaking. This is the way of our world.

By telling his tragedy via reverse chronology, Gaspar Noé seemingly throws his gut punches early. In the first act, we see a man’s skull smashed by a fire extinguisher; in the second act, we learn in one excruciating, uninterrupted take that this is revenge for the rȧpe of a woman. The intensity abates in the third act until we realize that the woman might be pregnant with the child of her boyfriend. The final scene finds the woman at a park, reading J.W. Dunne’s “An Experiment in Time” and taking in what should be the joyous sight of children frolicking in a spinning sprinkler. Noé cuts to a strobing image that appears to depict the birth of the cosmos. A title card comes up: “Time destroys everything.” Noé might as well have gone with “Why bother?” You’re not going to find a more pessimistic view of humanity than this.

This isn’t a downward spiral, it’s a full-on plummet. Darren Aronofsky’s visually intoxicating take on Hubert Selby’s brutal novel about addiction concludes with its four main characters hitting rock bottom at terminal velocity. If you’ve seen the film, Clint Mansell’s harrowing two-note music cue should be echoing in your noggin right now. Once the storm passes, we’re left with a gutting dream sequence in which ruined mother (Ellen Burstyn) and son (Jared Leto) are reunited on the set of a game show the former has won. It’s a pathetic happy ending that blows the notion of the American Dream to tatters.

Almost everyone knows the famous final line “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” But how many in this day and age have actually watched the film? Almost fifty years later, the frantic ending still packs a wallop. The cops kill Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), leaving her sister/daughter (Belinda Palmer) in the care of the child molester (John Huston) who sired the young girl. It’s a horrifying scene. Justice, decency, hope… it all dies at that moment.

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” Those are, of course, Andy Dufresne's words from Frank Darabont’s “The Shawshank Redemption”, and it’s the kind of wise counsel David Drayton could’ve used in the closing moments of the filmmaker’s spirit-snuffing take on Stephen King’s “The Mist”. Faced with certain, agonizing death at the hands of creatures that have apparently taken over the world, Drayton uses the last four bullets in his pistol to kill the remaining survivors, including his young son. But when Drayton walks out of his car to meet his fate, the mist clears and he realizes the ominous sounds he’d heard emanated from military vehicles. He killed his son for nothing. You never, ever give up hope in a Darabont movie.

Lars von Trier’s musical melodrama stars Björk as a visually impaired woman desperate to scrape together enough money to afford medical treatment that will spare her son the same sightless fate. Unfortunately, she trusts her secret to the wrong man. When her cash is stolen, she confronts the thief and accidentally shoots him. Von Trier is a world-class nihilist, so you know where this is going, but Björk is so sweet and compelling in the lead role that her unjust end at the gallows will absolutely wreck your day.

There’s no movie without master filmmaker Ang Lee and the dynamic screenwriting duo of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, but there’s no soul without the quiet, anguished yearning of Heath Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar, whose romance with fellow sheepherder Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) can never be. His virtuoso performance subtly crescendos to a moment of unbearable sorrow when he finds that the deceased Jack had kept their shirts hanging together in a closet. Ennis takes them home to his trailer and hangs them together with a postcard of Brokeback Mountain. His eyes well up with tears as he barely croaks out the words, “Jack, I swear.” In theaters, everyone stayed through the credits in the hopes of gathering themselves before they walked out to the lobby.