Although horror might be the genre most closely ᴀssociated with downbeat endings, movies like Se7en and Gone Girl prove that viewers are not necessarily any safer within the world of the thriller. Some horror movie endings take forever to recover from, but this is not all that shocking in the abstract. No matter how viciously cruel the ending of The Strangers: Chapter One or Eden Lake might be, viewers go into horror movies expecting to be horrified. As such, almost any level of unapologetic bleakness can be anticipated.

In contrast, thrillers can be tougher to predict. On the one hand, the thriller genre has provided viewers with some of the most satisfying movie endings of all time, and it is not hard to see how. Thrillers can set up countless clues only to pay them off in the movie’s closing moments and, if the protagonist is sufficiently smart, they may outmaneuver the villains at every turn and win with a last-second reversal of fortunes. However, thrillers are also home to some of the cruelest endings in all cinema.

10

Black Swan

Natalie Portman’s Heroine Succumbs to Insanity In Black Swan’s Ending

2010’s Black Swan follows the story of Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers, an NYC Ballet ballerina whose obsession with perfection eventually proves her tragic downfall. Director Darren Aronofsky’s warped story of doubles and doppelgängers sees Nina grow obsessed with her co-star, Mila Kunis’s Lily, when Nina is cast as the White Swan in Swan Lake. Although Lily and Nina initially become friends and even lovers, as Nina’s stress accumulates, she starts to view everyone around her as a threat to her all-important performance.

Winona Ryder’s bitter former star ballerina and Barbara Hershey’s controlling mother don’t help matters, and Nina is soon losing her grip on reality entirely in the days leading up to the performance. This culminates in a dazzling, shockingly dark finale wherein Nina seemingly murders Lily and then performs her role to rapturous applause, only for viewers to discover at the last second that she stabbed herself, not her co-star, and is dying in the movie’s crushing final moments.

9

Fallen

This Underrated Denzel Washington Takes A Nasty Turn

1998’s Fallen starts out like any number of The Silence of the Lambs knock-offs, as Denzel Washington’s taciturn detective searches for the culprit behind a series of heinous, seemingly unconnected crimes. However, this underrated Washington thriller takes a turn when the star’s cynical antihero, Detective John Hobbes, discovers that the being behind the killings isn’t human at all. A demonic force is the real villain of Fallen and this demon can jump from one body to another at will to cover up its crimes.

All hope seems lost until Hobbes tricks the demon into following him to a remote cabin in the woods, where he shoots himself and the demon’s final carrier. Although Hobbes does die, this ensures that the demon can’t possess another person and its reign of terror is finally over. Then the demon smugly jumps into the body of a nearby cat, revealing that it can also possess animals, and viewers realize that all of Hobbes’ torment, suffering, and even his eventual sacrifice were for nothing.

8

Gone Girl

David Fincher’s Gillian Flynn Adaptation Boasts An Admirably Dark Ending

The ending of Gone Girl is infamously cruel, and there is an admirable mean streak in author Gillian Flynn’s source novel that director David Fincher somehow heightens even further in the movie adaptation. After Ben Affleck’s beleaguered antihero is almost blamed for his wife’s disappearance, Rosamund Pike’s mercurial Amy saves the day by reappearing after killing her captor. Only her husband knows that she secretly faked her death, sought out her captor on her own, and killed him in cold blood.

However, as he threatens to reveal this to the world, Amy reveals she is pregnant at the end of Gone Girl and destroys her husband’s chances of getting revenge in the process. She effectively holds his future hostage, since he is now aware of the lengths she will go to when displeased, and she alone holds the future of their eventual offspring in her hands.

7

Oldboy

This Cult Classic Has A Bracingly Brutal Finale

Oldboy begins with its hero, a traumatized businessman named Oh Dae-su, being released from an unexplained 15-year imprisonment at the hands of unseen captors. While Oh Dae-su has only a short while to hunt down his captors, he still finds himself beginning an unlikely romantic tryst with a young sushi chef. Eventually, he learns he was imprisoned because he revealed a classmate’s incestuous relationship with his sister to the world, resulting in her taking her own life.

To Oh Dae-su’s horror, Oldboy’s villain reveals that the young sushi chef he has begun a romantic relationship with is Oh Dae-su’s own daughter. To make matters worse, the villain realizes his elaborate revenge has brought him no closer to peace and takes his own life, leaving Oh Dae-su a catatonic, horrified shell of a man.

6

Se7en

The Good Guys Lose In This Iconic Mystery Thriller

While Gone Girl has a nasty final twist, the ending of Se7en is inarguably Fincher’s most hopeless coda. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman’s pair of detectives, David Mills and William Somerset, don’t even come close to unmasking the serial killer who is tormenting their city, but he eventually gives himself up anyway. However, he has one last awful trick up his sleeve. When the killer reveals he has killed and mutilated Mills’ wife, Mills comes to embody the Wrath element of the killer’s master plan by shooting him out of horror and frustration.

5

No Country For Old Men

The Coen Brothers’ Modern Masterpiece Is Pitiless

Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men is a straightforward crime thriller with an exceedingly nasty finale. Not only does the implacable killer Anton Chigurgh end up killing the movie’s hero off-screen to no fanfare, but he even kills his wife based on the arbitrary outcome of a coin toss. He then manages to walk off a car crash with barely a scratch on him and, as No Country For Old Men’s downbeat ending wraps up, Tommy Le Jones’ local sheriff retires without capturing the villain or impacting his plan at all.

4

Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

This Dutch Cult Thriller Boasts A Vicious Twist

1988’s Dutch thriller Spoorloos (The Vanishing) was remade as an inferior American thriller, but only the original maintains director George Sluizer’s infamously cruel ending. When the protagonist’s girlfriend is kidnapped by an unseen attacker, he becomes obsessed with her unknown fate. Eventually, the villain meets up with him and promises to show him what happened to his girlfriend. The protagonist agrees to the villain’s demand and then wakes up buried alive in a coffin, dying slowly and spending his final agonizing minutes aware that his partner faced the same horrific fate before him.

3

Arlington Road

1999’s Grim Psychological Thriller Features A Stunning Final Twist

Arlington Road is a tense thriller wherein Jeff Bridges’ History professor and terrorism expert Michael Faraday begins to suspect his new neighbors of plotting a domestic terror attack. Although the professor’s friends and colleagues don’t believe him, he nonetheless tries to thwart their plot alone. Instead, Faraday plays right into their elaborate plan and, in a twist ending that is jaw-dropping for its pure audacity, ends up taking the fall for their entire attack. Not only does their plan succeed, but the world thinks that Faraday is the one responsible after he dies in the bombing.

2

Speak No Evil (2022)

This Danish Thriller Has A Thoroughly Twisted Conclusion

Like Spoorloos (The Vanishing), 2022’s Speak No Evil received an English-language remake after its initial success. Like that American re-imagining, 2024’s Speak No Evil drops the original, brutal ending in favor of a more conventional crowd-pleaser. Speak No Evil follows a family of Danish holidaymakers who take up their new Dutch friends on an offer to visit their remote countryside home. Once they arrive, the Danish family soon feels that things are a little strange, but their morbid politeness leads them to avoid saying anything about the odd behavior of their guests.

Gradually, the provocations of the Dutch family grow increasingly bizarre and threatening until it becomes clear that they are dangerous, violent criminals. The Danish family remains inexplicably docile and, in Speak No Evil’s shocking ending, the Dutch couple stones the protagonists to death at gunpoint while their helpless child looks on. What makes the ending so painfully hard to watch is the fact that, since the pair had many opportunities to escape, it was their inability to stand up for themselves that resulted in their eventual, entirely avoidable demise.

1

Chinatown

Jack Nicholson’s Famous Neo Noir Is Almost Unwatchably Bleak

Chinatown might start out as a convoluted conspiracy over LA water rights, but director Roman Polanski’s iconic neo-noir movie soon settles its focus on a much more viscerally upsetting kind of crime. After Jack Nicholson’s private eye, Jake Gittes, is hired by Mrs. Mulwray to uncover her husband’s infidelity, He thinks he has taken on a relatively straightforward case. However, he soon learns Mrs. Mulwray isn’t who she says she is when the real Mrs. Mulwray hires him to get to the bottom of a mysterious death.

By Chinatown’s ending, Jake has learned that Mrs. Mulwray’s father, the monstrous Noah Cross, impregnated her and had a child with his own daughter. When Mrs. Mulwray attempts to escape the тιтular setting, Cross has her killed and takes custody of their daughter, most likely planning to repeat this horrific cycle of abuse, and Jake is informed that there is nothing he can do to stop the untouchable magnate. As harsh as Se7en and Gone Girl might be, few movies in any genre can outdo this infamous twist for pure downbeat shock value.