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* The whole movie is disturbing. Especially during Teddy's first nightmare, when his wife turns around to reveal that she's missing a huge chunk of her back.
* The concentration camp scene, with the commandant who tries to shoot himself but botches it and ends up bleeding to death for an hour with half his head blown off. Or the many piles of corpses that overflowed from the trains and froze together. Look carefully, and you can see one with a ribcage poking out.
* The lake scene. It starts so placid, so peaceful and then in a flash the viewer is punched in a face with a gust of the most mind-freezing and dehumanizing insanity, as [[strike:Teddy]] Andrew understands that his wife has just drowned their three children. He has to drag them out of the water himself. And then she asks him to sit them at the table and play dolls with their bodies. He shoots his wife as she tries to embrace him, both sobbing. All in the same placid and even cheerful tone.
** Probably even worse: All that happens is mentioned in other situations before. The moment when the viewer sees the things happen one after the other and remember the random mentions makes everything so much more traumatic.
* The disorienting sounds that accompany Teddy's hallucinations. They're somewhere between giggling children and chittering insects.
* The cliff covered in rats.
* The film (and the novel it is based on) is a very good example of how a perfectly sane and "normal" person can be driven to complete insanity. Andrew Laeddis was a good man, a decorated veteran and a dedicated US Marshal who, despite his implied alcoholism, was a totally sane individual and a loving husband and father. His only flaw was refusing to admit that his wife was crazy and needed psychiatric help, even after burning down their apartment. His refusal to even acknowledge her insanity eventually culminated in her murdering all three of their children, an act which would cause Andrew to kill her in turn. This very traumatic event, along with horrors witnessed during the war, ends up breaking his mind and putting him into a constant state of denial, creating a fantasy narrative for himself where the incident never happened. Andrew ends up spending two years in this state before he is eventually lobotomised. It helps to show how even people who appear to be completely sound of mind can descend into madness through nothing more than mere circumstance. As Dr. Cawley points out, sanity isn't a choice; it can happen to anybody.
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