15 Movies Where Everybody Loses In The End

Darren Aronofsky’s harrowing 2000 movie, Requiem for a Dream, is one of those films that most people would prefer never to see again. Following the deteriorating lives of four drug addicts, it hauntingly portrays the heady thrills and shattering consequences of addiction. Sara (Ellen Burstyn) is a middle-aged widow who begins taking amphetamines to lose weight for a television game show she hopes to appear in. Her son, Harry (Jared Leto), and his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) are heroin addicts who hope to open a clothing store showcasing Marion’s designs. Harry’s friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) is also an addict, and the two men sell drugs to break free from their desperate lives. The plot follows the four characters as they enable each other while also finding comfort and recognition. Though they all imagine better lives and try to drag themselves out of darkness, none of them escape. Marion and Harry’s relationship breaks down when he pushes her into prostitution to fund their next score, and she begins working for a pimp who forces her into dehumanizing sexual acts. Harry and Tyrone are arrested when they go to the hospital to treat Harry’s arm which is decaying from heroin injections. The arm is amputated in prison. Sara is committed to a mental institution where she refuses food and medication. The final sequence of the movie is infamously devastating. Alone, all four characters curl into the fetal position. Marion lies surrounded by crumpled drawings of her clothing designs, clinging to a bag of heroin. Harry sobs in his hospital bed. Tyrone lies in his prison cell after suffering painful withdrawal symptoms and racial abuse from the guards. And Sara lies catatonic in the mental institution, hallucinating an alternate world in which she is a contestant on the TV show with Harry and Marion, engaged and healthy, in the audience. Few movie endings reach this level of emotional trauma, for the characters or the audience.

Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s breakout horror novel has an ending more chilling than the bloodbath that made it famous. Bullied teen Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is mocked by her peers when she gets her first period at school, and her pent-up rage causes a lightbulb to shatter, hinting at telekinetic powers. At home, her religiously zealous mother (Piper Laurie) tells her that menstruation is a mark of sin and warns her not to go to prom, fearing sexual advances from her male peers. The prom turns disastrous for a different reason, however. When Carrie’s bullies dump pig’s blood on her, she loses control and destroys the building with her telekinetic powers, killing everyone inside. When she returns home, she and her mother have a violent confrontation that ends when Carrie crucifies her mother with flying knives and starts a fire that burns them alive. Carrie is a gruesome movie, but at its heart, it’s a tragedy about an alienated teenage girl who is a victim of abuse at home and at school. Instead of empowering her, her supernatural abilities destroy her. She is both the victim and antagonist of the story. Like her changing body, she has no control over her powers except to cause devastation, and eventually chooses to self-destruct. But even in death, Carrie cannot rest. The final, terrifying shot shows a classmate visiting her grave. As the classmate stoops to lay flowers on the ground, a bloody hand reaches through the dirt and grips her arm. It’s a shocking twist suggesting that even Carrie’s attempt to end her suffering has not been entirely successful.

The discovery of a bag containing over $4 million in cash is not the lucky break that it seems for Hank (Bill Paxton), his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and their friend Lou (Brent Briscoe). They think the money is untraceable, but when an innocent bystander notices something suspicious, Hank kills him, setting off a chain of deadly efforts to keep their windfall a secret. The three men clash. Hank is a college graduate in a town where most people only make it through high school, and, under the guidance of his pregnant wife (Bridget Fonda), comes up with a meticulous plan to ensure they avoid suspicion. Jacob is uncomplicated and kind, but prone to reacting violently under pressure. Lou is the local drunk with a chip on his shoulder about Hank’s condescension and wants to split the money as quickly as possible. The title of the movie is ironic. There is nothing simple about their plan. As Hank chooses to kill people to avoid detection, Lou is quickly taken out of the picture and Jacob’s conscience destroys him. When Hank is finally in the clear, he learns that the money was tagged and he’ll never be able to use it - and thus he has no choice but to burn it. Having killed innocent people for a bag of worthless paper, he's left with nothing but a tortured conscience and a wife who he now knows may have an even darker side than he does.

From the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime thriller The Departed, the two leads are in opposition, and it's clear someone will end up losing. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a fiery young police officer who goes undercover to bring down local Boston crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, an apparently exemplary cop who’s secretly working for Costello. Which of them will come out on top is the question that pervades the movie. Will it be the good guy who’s pretending to be bad or the bad guy who’s pretending to be good? The answer, in the end, is neither. The losses begin racking up when Costigan indirectly causes the death of his superior, Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen). Sullivan also suffers a blow when he learns that Costello has been acting as an FBI informant. Betrayed and concerned about having his cover blown, he shoots the crime boss and accepts praise from his fellow officers. When Costigan and Sullivan finally confront each other, neither comes out on top. Costigan is shot by an officer who turns out to have been another mole, and Sullivan is killed by Queenan’s former partner. The two men succeed in identifying each other, but neither receives glory. Costigan’s employment record was erased, meaning that his association with Costello appears to be the result of criminal intent, not undercover work. Sullivan’s legacy is compromised by incriminating tapes that prove he was the mole. Not even the “good” characters win. Queenan’s partner no longer has a position on the force, and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), the psychologist who dated both Sullivan and Costigan, is pregnant with a child who will never know its father.

Christopher Nolan’s 2009 mystery follows the rivalry between two magicians in 1890s London who spend years bitterly sabotaging each other’s performances. Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) devise increasingly daring tricks to outdo each other, and when Borden presents a new performance in which he appears to invisibly transport from one side of the stage to the other, Angier is determined to create his own version, whatever the cost. The machine he uses is a cloning device, and he must kill every double he creates. But even this extreme dedication to his craft pales in comparison to his rival’s. Borden, it turns out, was never a single man, but a pair of identical twins whose obsession drove them to lead a single, tortured life in pursuit of their craft. Despite their success, neither Angier nor the Bordens can survive the rivalry. The darkness they embrace to compete with one another destroys them all. One of the twins is framed and executed for the murder of Angier’s first clone, and Angier is eventually killed in retaliation by the surviving Borden brother, Alfred. Even though he physically survives, Alfred is a broken man. Of the two brothers, he had been a dedicated family man, but deceived his wife to ensure the success of his double act. Not knowing that her husband was two separate people, his wife was so tormented by the inconsistency of the man she loved that she eventually committed suicide. Alfred remains alive, but can never bring back his beloved wife or the brother who was the key to his professional success.

Held in a mysterious private prison for 15 years without explanation, businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) learns that his wife has been murdered and his young daughter sent to foster care. Upon his release, Dae-su is given five days to figure out who captured him. As he searches, he uses a clawhammer to extract information (and teeth) and begins a sexual relationship with a sushi chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong). When he finally finds his captor, he learns that it is a former classmate named Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), whose sister committed suicide after Dae-su witnessed the siblings having an incestuous encounter. Woo-jin kills himself, but not before landing one final blow, revealing that through hypnosis, he orchestrated Dae-su’s relationship with Mi-do. With photographs, Woo-jin reveals that Mi-do is Dae-su’s daughter. Dae-su has successfully tracked down his killer, but fell into the man’s trap in the process. He even cut out his tongue in a desperate attempt to convince Woo-jin to not tell Mi-do of his true identity. At the end of the movie, he finds the hypnotist who had worked for Woo-jin and begs her to wipe his mind clean so he will forget that Mi-do is his daughter. She complies, but when the unsuspecting Mi-do reunites with Dae-su and declares her love for him, the expression on his face, though happy at first, tenses into something closer to a grimace. Even hypnosis couldn’t make this a happy ending.

Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 Oscar-winning psychological thriller deals all of its characters a losing hand. It follows the four members of the impoverished Kim family as they insinuate themselves into the wealthy Park family. The son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), the father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), the mother, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), and the daughter, Ki-jung (Park So-dam), pose as strangers and secure various positions in the Park household. Their fragile equilibrium is thrown off, however, when they discover that the husband of a former employee has been living in the basement since before the Parks moved in. This three-tiered system of dependence proves untenable, and in a bloody denouement, the man emerges from the basement, attacks Ki-woo, and fatally stabs Ki-jung. Both families are torn apart by this incident. When the movie ends, Ki-woo, having returned to the family’s home in the slums of Seoul with his mother, observes a flashlight signaling morse code in Park’s house. He discovers that his father has fled to the basement, and imagines himself going to college and earning enough money to buy the house from the German family who now lives there. Ensuring that the audience understands the reality, however, the movie closes with a shot of Ki-woo sitting in the dingy, claustrophobic semi-basement flat where he and his family were living at the beginning of the story. The implication is clear: Having gone to extraordinary lengths to pull themselves out of poverty, the Kims are more trapped than ever. According to Bong, he wanted to end with this “surefire kill” of a shot because he “just felt that frankness was right for the film.” No one wins, but while both families lose a loved one, the Kims aren't able to move somewhere else and start a new life. Instead, with Mr. Kim now living in the basement of the Park's former home, they are left to begin the cycle again.

Set in a snowy Wyoming outpost shortly after the end of the Civil War, Quentin Tarantino’s bloody Western The Hateful Eight follows a group of murderous strangers who spend an evening trying to kill each other until there is no one left. Among the cast of characters is Samuel L Jackson’s Union soldier turned bounty hunter named Warren, Walton Goggins’s former Confederate soldier turned sheriff named Mannix, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s notorious outlaw named Daisy Domergue, and Kurt Russell’s “The Hangman” Ruth who is meant to transport Daisy to the gallows. Tensions roil from the moment the travelers join the supporting cast of characters in the snowy outpost, and Daisy leverages the trigger-happy atmosphere to turn the tables on her captors. After shootings, hangings, and a poisoning, the only characters left are Warren, Mannix, and Domergue. No one in the movie is a hero, but it’s reasonable to assume that at least one will make it out alive. Instead, Daisy is hanged by Mannix and Warren, who succumb to gunshot wounds shortly thereafter. Their deaths play out with classic Tarantino fanfare, but beyond the blood and torture, none of the characters get what they were looking for, even in death. All of the characters begin their journey expecting a new life, in some form or another, when they reach their destinations. Daisy wants freedom, Warren wants the money for the bounty corpses he’d been transporting, and Mannix wants to get to Little Rock to start his new job. Instead, hatred and suspicion cause them to destroy each other and themselves.

Titanic and Brokeback Mountain often top the list of romantic tearjerkers, but Atonement, Joe Wright’s 2009 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name, gives them a run for their money. Not only is the main couple doomed to a tragic end, but their misfortune is an avoidable consequence of someone else’s deception, not the result of an iceberg or cultural intolerance. Set in 1935, the movie begins when 12-year-old aspiring novelist Briony (Saoirse Ronan) witnesses a romantic encounter between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightly) and her family’s gardener, Robbie (James McAvoy). Jealous and confused, she convinces herself that it was an assault. Later, the girls’ 15-year-old cousin, Lola, is assaulted in the dark, and Briony identifies Robbie as the rapist. After years in prison, Robbie is released to fight in World War II. He and Cecilia eventually reconnect and fall back in love. Briony realizes that the man who assaulted Lola was a family friend and that the two are now married. Wracked with guilt, she apologizes to Robbie and offers to help overturn his assault conviction. It’s a bittersweet conclusion to a painful saga, but the movie isn’t over yet. Skipping decades into the future, Briony is an aging, successful novelist who has just published her final book. In an interview, it’s revealed that, not only did she fail to overturn Robbie’s conviction, but Robbie and Cecilia never reconnected after the fateful night of his arrest. He died in France shortly after being released from prison, and Cecilia died in a bomb shelter not long after. Lola, meanwhile, is still married to her rapist. In some movies, death is a form of redemption or consolation, but in Atonement, it’s the opposite. Robbie and Cecilia die without expressing their love or knowing the truth behind the accusation, while Briony survives into old age, forever tormented by the childhood deception that shattered the lives of the people she loved.

From the beginning of Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 psychological thriller, Nightmare Alley, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) is hiding a dark side. He sets his house on fire with the body of his recently deceased father, and goes looking for a job. Beginning as a manual laborer for a traveling carnival, he teaches himself to perform as a psychic. His ambition leads him to a powerful psychologist, Dr. Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who gives him inside knowledge of her wealthy clients so he can pretend to communicate with their dead loved ones. But his desire for money and power outstrips his skills as a con artist, and after an interaction with a client ends in brutal violence, he is left destitute and alone. At the beginning of the movie when Carlisle joins the carnival, he is fascinated and horrified by one of the acts. “The geek,” advertised as neither man nor beast, crouches in a cage while audiences shriek with horror as he bites into the neck of a live chicken. The carnival leader tells Carlisle that creating a geek is straightforward: find a hopeless drunk, tell him it’s a temporary job, and hook him on opium so he will never be able to leave. From there the man will descend into irrevocable depths of addiction and savagery. At the end of the movie, Carlisle, drunk and penniless, seeks work as a psychic at another carnival. The director of the operation tells him he could maybe offer him a temporary job, “just until we get another geek [...] You think you can handle it?” As realization dawns, Carlisle begins to laugh and sob uncontrollably. Accepting his fate, he responds, “Mister, I was born for it.”

The line between hero worship and violent obsession is blurred in Andrew Dominik’s 2007 western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Brad Pitt stars as James, the infamous outlaw and mythical antihero who robbed banks and trains from the late 1860s until his death in 1882 at the age of 34. The movie depicts the relationship between James and his eventual assassin, Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), a man who idolizes the outlaw from childhood and is eager to point out all the similarities he sees between them. His attempts to join James’s gang are rebuffed even though his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell) is already a member. When James mocks Ford and attacks his young cousin, the younger man’s reverence begins to curdle. His resentment turns to hatred, and he strikes a deal with the governor of Missouri to kill James in exchange for immunity and a generous reward. In this respect, Ford achieves his goal, but he fails to reap the benefits he expects. Ford wants to be the version of Jesse James that he worshiped as a younger man. He thinks that, by murdering one of the most wanted men in America, he will take his place as an outlaw of mythical stature – beloved and feared by the public, respected by fellow bandits, and remembered throughout history. Instead, his efforts to construct his legend backfire. As he and Charley travel the country re-enacting his assassination of Jesse, the public rebels, hurling abuse and labeling him a “coward.” James’s mystique grows while Ford’s turns from infamy to irrelevance. Charley commits suicide, unable to live with his guilt over betraying James. When Robert Ford is killed at the age of 30, he’s working at a saloon in Colorado. His ambition to take James’s place has caused the opposite. By killing the most famous outlaw in America, he ensures that the man is remembered as an emblem of freedom and honor, while Ford himself will only be remembered as the coward who betrayed him.

Denis Villeneuve's 2013 mystery, Prisoners, explores the ways people construct prisons for themselves and others. When his 6-year-old daughter Anna and her friend go missing, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is so blinded by fear and rage that he becomes a monster. Suspecting a man (Paul Dano) who owns an RV that he’d spotted outside his house, Dover attacks and imprisons him, descending into deeper levels of violence and brutality. Meanwhile, detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) commits himself to the case and grows more disturbed and obsessive about the darkness he discovers around him. Both men separately uncover the truth: a local woman, Alice Jones (Melissa Leo), has been abducting and killing children ever since her son succumbed to cancer, in hopes of turning other parents into monsters like herself. Her first target was the man Dover tortured and imprisoned. When Dover confronts the woman, she shoots him in the leg and traps him in a concealed pit. When Loki confronts her, he kills her and rescues Dover’s daughter. Early in the movie, Anna mentions a red whistle that her parents tell her to carry for safety. When Dover falls into the pit, he finds the whistle. Loki returns to the Jones house at night and sits alone in the darkened crime scene. Just before the screen fades to black, he hears the faint sound of a whistle. Whether Loki rescues Dover or allows him to die in retaliation for torturing and imprisoning an innocent man is up for interpretation, though Aaron Guzikowski, the screenwriter, said he believes the detective saves Dover. Either way, Dover will face extensive prison time. And Loki also suffers. Even though he averted the deaths of two children, he has waded into unimaginable levels of darkness throughout the investigation that he cannot erase. Achieving the desired result comes at a price.

An epic of sweeping cinematic proportions, the legacy of Gone with the Wind often overshadows its story. Receiving more Academy Awards than any film at the time it was released in 1939 and earning higher box office returns than any film in history when adjusted for inflation, it is regularly cited as one of the best movies ever made despite its many controversial elements. Set in and around the Civil War, it follows Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), a Southern Belle and daughter of a wealthy plantation owner as she aggressively pursues the affections of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and tries to keep her family afloat after the South is routed by the war. Scarlett is an unsympathetic heroine whose desire for Ashley distracts her from the real love of her life, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). She eventually settles for marrying Rhett, only to pull away from the relationship when motherhood damages her physical identity. When she finally realizes that she loves him, it’s too late. He leaves her on her family’s crumbling plantation, dismissing her pleas for sympathy with the immortal line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” No one wins in Gone with the Wind. Scarlett and Rhett are deserving victims of their own selfishness, but even the innocent characters come up short-handed. Ashley’s wife, Melanie, dies in childbirth, while Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter dies in a tragic accident. This makes the ending of the movie both satisfying and tragic, even though it fails to address the greatest injustice of all, which is its ignorantly utopian portrayal of slavery. Of all the losers in the movie, history may be the biggest victim of them all.

Who killed Jimmy Hoffa? According to Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, it was a man named Frank Sheeran. Based on Sheeran’s factually dubious memoir, the movie tells the story of how the Philadelphia truck driver (played by Robert De Niro) went from doing odd jobs for the Mafia to becoming the friend and bodyguard of Hoffa (Al Pacino). The Irishman shows the events in flashback, as Sheeran confesses to killing the Teamster union leader while living out his last days in a nursing home decades later. This vantage point gives the story a mournful feel, with Sheeran’s solitude a clear indication that he has lost his family and friends. Movies about organized crime rarely have winners. The Godfather series, Scarface, and Goodfellas - to name a few - demonstrate how unlikely it is for gangsters to avoid destruction at the hands of either their rivals or themselves. But The Irishman shows how these losses can follow one of these figures if they are “lucky” enough to survive into old age. In response to Hoffa’s unsolved disappearance, Sheeran and many of his colleagues land behind bars for extortion and racketeering, while other members of the group are murdered. Slowly, the mobsters die in prison. When Sheeran is released into a nursing home, dying of cancer, he reveals to a priest that his daughter cut off their relationship when she began suspecting that he was involved in Hoffa’s disappearance. Alone and dying, he turns to his long-dormant Catholic faith but seems unrepentant for his crimes. The absolution the priest offers him, therefore, yields no sense of relief or conclusiveness. When the movie ends, he asks an orderly to leave his door open. Viewers have analyzed this moment from multiple angles, but no matter how it's interpreted, the open door signifies a lack of resolution. Despite his impending death, Sheeran is stuck in the past, waiting for family who will never visit, or accountability for a murder that was never solved.

Director Raoul Walsh specialized in unvarnished, unsentimental, and often unglamorous film noirs showcasing hardened criminals and world-weary cons looking for a way out. In High Sierra, his third pairing with Humphrey Bogart, he delivers another cynical yet moving movie about a career criminal in search of an exit. Roy Earle (Bogart) is released from his life sentence in prison by a crooked politician who wants him for a job. His task is to rob a tourist resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a heist that Roy is willing to perform to attain his freedom. Resolving that it will be his last job, he sets the plan in motion, but gangsters rarely get a break when they try to go straight, and Roy is no exception. The robbery spirals out of control and Roy goes on the run. The ultimate chase through the hairpin turns of the dusty mountain passes is hair-raising, but the robber’s fate is more tragic than thrilling. Despite being a professional criminal, Roy is a thoughtful man with earnest intentions and modest goals now that he’s out of prison. But his release from prison is not what he expected. Instead of giving him a new lease on life, it tantalizes him with possibilities, only to rip them away. He falls in love with a beautiful young woman and her family but is heartbroken when she chooses another man. He is tied to a robbery that seems doomed from the start, and is haunted by nightmares from his past. And once he’s on the run, he’s pursued by a devoted woman (played by Ida Lupino) who embodies everything he’s trying to leave behind. Hemmed in by police, he falls to his death from his hiding place high in the Sierra Nevadas, having never attained freedom.