History TooBleakStoppedCaring / Film

** Despite being one his best films, "Film/EdwardScissorhands" is also one of his more depressing ones, second only to ''Film/BatmanReturns''. The film is basically about Edward initially being accepted by the outside world, only to be rejected and eventually forced to live all alone. And the amount of torment poor Edward has to go through, from being forced to live with the burden of having scissor-like hands, to being framed for burglary and being falsely slandered as a rapist, resulting in the whole town turning against him and forcing him to isolate himself for the rest of his life can leave a rather bitter taste in many people's mouths. The tearjerking music by Creator/DannyElfman also doesn't help.

** Despite being one his best films, "Film/Edward Scissorhands" is also one of his more depressing ones, second only to ''Film/BatmanReturns''. The film is basically about Edward initially being accepted by the outside world, only to be rejected and eventually forced to live all alone. And the amount of torment poor Edward has to go through, from being forced to live with the burden of having scissor-like hands, to being framed for burglary and being falsely slandered as a rapist, resulting in the whole town turning against him and forcing him to isolate himself for the rest of his life can leave a rather bitter taste in many people's mouths. The tearjerking music by Creator/DannyElfman also doesn't help.

* One of the main problems with ''Film/ResidentEvilFilmSeries'' is how bleak the setting is and how worse it constantly gets through every installment. However, things got ''really'' bleak (if not hopeless) with ''Film/ResidentEvilTheFinalChapter''. First of all, Umbrella is revealed to have engineered the whole apocalypse in the first place. Then, the last stand last seen in ''[[FilmResidentEvilRetribution Retribution]]'' turns out to be ''another'' one of Umbrella's traps, leaving everyone except Alice either dead or missing. Then Alice learns that her life was fake from the start and one of her newfound friends turns out to be in cahoots with Umbrella. It's little wonder it bombed at the box office when it was released.

* One of the main problems with ''Film/ResidentEvilFilmSeries'' is how bleak the setting is and how worse it constantly gets through every installment. However, things got ''really'' bleak (if not hopeless) with ''Film/ResidentEvilTheFinalChapter''. First of all, Umbrella is revealed to have engineered the whole apocalypse in the first place. Then, the last stand last seen in ''Retribution'' turns out to be ''another'' Umbrella's trap, leaving everyone except Alice either dead or missing. Then Alice learns that her life was fake from the start and one of her newfound friends turns out to be in cahoots with Umbrella. It's little wonder it bombed at the box office when it was released.

* One of the main problems with ''Film/ResidentEvilFilmSeries'' is how bleak the setting is and how worse it constantly gets through every installment.
** ''Film/ResidentEvil2002'' ends with the T-Virus escaping the Hive and causing a zombie apocalypse in Raccoon City, while all Alice's teammates are either dead or infected.
** Then, as if that couldn't get any worse, ''Film/ResidentEvilExtinction'' takes place after the T-Virus escaped once again and this time spread across the whole planet, also bringing global drought (somehow).
** ''Film/ResidentEvilAfterlife'' reveals that Arcadia, the supposed safe haven the heroes had been trying to reach, was a trap all along set up by Umbrella, with survivors being held in for experimentation.
** Afterwards, ''Film/ResidentEvilRetribution'' opens with Alice's group ''losing'' the battle and getting captured by Umbrella.
** But things got ''really'' bleak (if not hopeless) with ''Film/ResidentEvilTheFinalChapter''. First of all, Umbrella is revealed to have engineered the whole apocalypse in the first place. Then, the last stand last seen in ''Retribution'' turns out to be ''another'' Umbrella's trap, leaving everyone except Alice either dead or missing. Then Alice learns that her life was fake from the start and one of her newfound friends turns out to be in cahoots with Umbrella.

* ''Franchise/PiratesOfTheCaribbean'' series:
** ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanAtWorldsEnd'': ''Everyone'' backstabs each other and shifts alliances on a whim, to the point that it's hard to root for anyone by the end unless you care about their motivations. While it's only natural, given that the protagonists are all pirates by this point (even Will and Elizabeth), the climax of the film has them cheer about how pirates represent freedom and such... when they pillage and murder. Hardly heroic.
** ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanOnStrangerTides'' suffers even more from this, as without Will and Elizabeth, every major character in the film is a self-serving criminal.
** ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanDeadMenTellNoTales'' cranks this up even ''more'', with the entire cast of self-serving criminals having taken a ''massive'' [[TookALevelInJerkAss level in jerk ass]] (even ''Gibbs''), making the movie honestly quite unpleasant to watch. The closest it gets to likeable characters are newcomers Henry and Carina, who are [[BaseBreakingCharacter Base Breakers]] at best and essentially carbon-copies of Phillip and Syrena, who were essentially carbon-copies of Will and Elizabeth. Really, the only character keeping the movie [[IncrediblyLamePun afloat]] is the CreepyAwesome Salazar and his ship that ''eats other ships''... and we're supposed to root against him.

* ''Film/DontBreathe'' stars a trio of burglars who decide to break into the home of a blind war veteran and steal the $300,000 settlement he got when his daughter was killed in a car accident. Even with Rocky's admittedly sympathetic motive of moving herself and her sister away from their AbusiveParents, such a [[DesignatedHero repulsively horrid act]] ''would'' have you [[RootingForTheEmpire completely on the side of the blind man]], but he is so unsympathetically crazy [[spoiler:to the point he's an [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil outright kidnapper and rapist]]]] that it's impossible to root for him either. TheReveal about the Blind Man was meant to [[BlackAndGrayMorality give the robbers the moral high ground]] but it doesn't change how predatory and heartless their intended crime was (they were ''counting'' on him being a harmless blind man and thus an easy victim), making it impossible to want anyone to succeed.
** Compounded even ''further'' with its sequel, ''Film/DontBreathe2'', where the Blind Man is now TheProtagonist in an [[EvilVersusEvil evil vs. evil]] plot, rather than TheAntagonist as before. Many a potential audience member took one look at the premise expecting them to root for him, and expressed [[YouHaveGotToBeKiddingMe EXTREME incredulity]], to say the least.

* ''Film/TheButterflyEffect'': Many reviewers claim that the film is so oppressively dark that it almost becomes [[{{Narm}} hard to take seriously]]. The entire first half-hour of the movie is a nonstop TraumaCongaLine for the main character, where he's nearly strangled by his institutionalized father, gets molested by his neighbor, accidentally murders a woman and her baby with dynamite, watches his dog get tied up in a sack and burned to death, sees his best friend lose his mind, and receives news that the love of his life has committed suicide. The rest of the movie follows his attempts to make everything better with time travel...[[FromBadToWorse which end up making it]] ''[[FromBadToWorse worse]]''.

* ''Film/BatmanVSupermanDawnOfJustice'': One of the prevailing criticisms about the film was how bleak it was, with Superman spending much of the runtime doubting himself, feeling burdened by his duties, or being depressed, while Batman is portrayed as a violent, xenophobic hypocrite who refuses to to the sensible thing and has given up on his most basic principles as a hero, with the world around both of them being shown to be pretty rotten with little effort to improve -- and then the whole thing ended with [[spoiler:Superman dying immediately after finding something to fight for, just so he'd be out of commission for most of a ''Justice League'' movie]], leaving audiences on a note where a threat more dangerous than [[spoiler:Doomsday (who was the one who just killed Superman)]] is on the immediate horizon and there's little hope to stop it without [[spoiler:Superman, even with Batman and Wonder Woman teaming up and presumably heading out to look for the Justice League (though this is never explicitly stated)]]. Many unfavorably contrasted ''Batman v Superman'' with how the Marvel Cinematic Universe films managed to balance levity and seriousness with character work truer to the source material, and based on box office returns, it seemed that many hoped that a "versus" movie might instead be more of a crowd-pleaser instead of a dour, slow-paced melodrama. Shortly after the movie's release, public relations for DC Films spent a considerable amount of time ahead of ''Justice League'' talking about how future movies would be more hopeful and optimistic in nature.

* Some entries in the ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' series can run headlong into this:
** ''Film/Alien3'' is unrelentingly grim and nihilistic. The film ''starts'' by killing off the entire supporting cast of ''Film/{{Aliens}}'', rendering the time Ripley spent rescuing Newt from the atmosphere processor on LV-426 as a [[HappyEndingOverride colossal waste of effort]]. In their place are a group of violent inmates on a backwater prison planet who sport shaved heads (making it difficult to tell them apart) and are almost all interchangeable. The few sympathetic supporting characters are killed off very early in the film or die en masse in the tunnel scene just before the ending. The audience has no reason to root for any of the inmates besides Dillon, despite the film's attempt to claim otherwise. It ends with [[spoiler:the lead character (Ripley) sacrificing herself to stop Weyland-Yutani from getting their hands on the xenomorph]], and the only people alive at the end are a group of W-Y commandos and a single prisoner. Even a few of the actors in the franchise have this view, including Creator/RonPerlman (who played Johner in ''Film/AlienResurrection'') and Creator/LanceHenriksen, who played Bishop in ''Aliens'' and ''3'' and despite being in the film, the latter didn't sugarcoat his views on it, flat-out calling the film nihilistic in both the documentary and commentary.
** ''Film/AlienCovenant'': The hopeful tone at the end of ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' is rendered null and void in the first half-hour, as [[spoiler:the Engineer home planet is completely wiped out and Elizabeth Shaw dies ([[DeathByCameo off-screen, no less]]) via experimentation by David.]] The crew of the ''Covenant'' are killed off in increasingly-messy ways. The villain also seems to constantly have the upper hand on the protagonists; some viewers have claimed that some of the plot points are {{Ass Pull}}s [[spoiler:just to make sure that David wins.]]
** A common complaint about ''Film/AliensVsPredatorRequiem'' is that the film tries ''way'' too hard to be as disturbing and viscerally disgusting as possible. This manifests primarily in the form of uninteresting human characters (on top of them dropping dead like flies as collateral damage fodder in the extraterrestrials' conflict), the Xenomorphs being incredibly vile [[BodyHorror even by their standards]] (most notably with the Predalien turning ''pregnant women into Chestburster nests, having said bursters eating the child within'').

* A lot of the works of Creator/TheCoenBrothers (as an example, ''Film/TheManWhoWasntThere2001'' or ''Film/ASeriousMan'') are loaded with an absurd amount of BlackComedy... ''way'' too absurd and most importantly ''way'' too dark. Horrible people doing horrible things that will most probably end with them dying horrible deaths... or worse yet, becoming an IdiotHoudini that will most probably carry on without having learnt anything. Or worse yet, good people will be [[TheChewToy driven through]] [[CosmicPlaything the wringer]] to the point that they come out the other side [[MaddenIntoMisanthropy maddened into becoming]] TheAntiNihilist... when they come out alive.
* The works of Creator/DavidCronenberg are often prone to this trope due to their [[BodyHorror morbid subject matter]], [[NauseaFuel grotesque imagery]], and near-total lack of levity, not to mention the fact that the characters generally tend to be pretty unpleasant people. Even his most famous and "mainstream" production, ''Film/{{The Fly|1986}}'', is not entirely immune as it does not shy away from the gore in the slightest. In fact, one scene had to be cut from the film precisely for inducing this reaction in the test audience.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheAngryBirdsMovie'': Even if Red is a jerk, it's very hard to sympathize with the bird community when (almost) everyone treats him like a moron throughout the film.

* ''Film/Joker2019'': Though Gotham's always been a miserable place, it's exacerbated here by its awfulness being unchanged in a realistic setting devoid of heroes. The vast majority of people Arthur meets are terrible, and he winds up being no better than them. It's understandable that some viewers struggle to connect to or care for a nearly exclusively grim narrative.

* ''Film/{{Unfriended}}'' is about a bunch of assholes who cyberbully a girl at school to the point of suicide. If you think you'll get any sort of relief as this ghost tortures her murderers? They reveal she was also a bully.[[labelnote:*]Albeit one who tried to atone for her past, making her one step above the rest of the cast.[[/labelnote]] This leaves the movie with little to keep the plot grounded, or nobody to root for or hope escapes their fate as the main characters fumble around getting murdered. The sequel ''Film/UnfriendedDarkWeb'' fares worse, being far more cliche and driven by idiocy without any of the themes of the first film. The sequel also sees plenty of innocents getting slaughtered with no indication there's any way to stop them, taking away the catharsis some may have felt seeing the bullies get wiped out.

* ''Film/{{Unfriended}}'' is about a bunch of assholes who cyberbully a girl at school to the point of suicide. If you think you'll get any sort of relief as this ghost tortures her murderers? They reveal she isn't any better than her killers. This leaves the movie with absolutely nothing to keep the plot grounded, nobody to root for or hope escapes their fate as these idiots fumble around, not logging of Skype for some reason and trying to leave their houses rather than just fumbling around getting murdered. The sequel ''Film/UnfriendedDarkWeb'' is not much better, being far more cliche and driven by idiocy withiut any of the themes of the first film.

* The 1977 film ''Film/EmpireOfTheAnts'' has the majority of the human characters being such a bunch of [[Jerkass jerks]] that it’s hard not to root for the giant mutant killer ants.

* ''Film/{{Unfriended}}'' is about a bunch of assholes who cyberbully a girl at school to the point of suicide. If you think you'll get any sort of relief as this ghost tortures her murderers? They reveal she isn't any better than her killers. This leaves the movie with absolutely nothing to keep the plot grounded, nobody to root for or hope escapes their fate as these idiots fumble around, not logging of Skype for some reason and trying to keep their houses rather than just fumbling around getting murdered. The sequel ''Film/UnfriendedDarkWeb'' is not much better, being far more cliche and driven by idiocy withiut any of the themes of the first film.