Shower Of Angst / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

• Probably the most iconic (and most parodied) example in film comes in The Crying Game after the protagonist discovers the truth about Dil.
• Harriet the Spy: After being ruthlessly bullied by everyone in class (including her former friends), and having paint dumped on her, Harriet runs home upset and dives into the bathtub fully clothed, scrubbing furiously at a tattoo signifying the friendship she had with her friends.
• The Spectacular Now: Sutter takes a very angsty shower after his actions indirectly cause injuries to girlfriend Aimee.
• In both the 1976 version and remake of Carrie the titular character is seen in the openings taking a shower after gym and freaking out after getting her first period and not knowing what it is, and having the other girls tease her for it. Her abusive mother Margaret does not help matters later on either; rather she yells at Carrie and throws her into a closet convinced that she sinned. Also, at the end of both movies, when Carrie finally returns home after going on a rampage around town, she climbs into the tub, sobbing while she scrubs the pig's blood off her, quickly turning the water pink.
• The female protagonist takes one of these in Punk Love after being raped by a cab driver. It's worth noting that she does not take a shower after she is raped by her step-father (at least not on screen).
• Spider-Man 3: Peter goes home and takes a steaming shower after managing to free himself of the symbiote.
• Vesper Lynd, the Bond girl of Casino Royale (2006), has a minor nervous breakdown after helping Bond kill Steven Obanno, and she sits under a running shower with her clothes on. Bond joins her in the shower, also completely clothed, showing her he knows exactly how she feels. The original script called for her to be in her underdrawers, but Daniel Craig convinced them that it didn't make character sense, so she kept her dress on. Weird, but probably more dramatically effective.
• In this same vein, an unrelated shower scene in Saw III' (more like Shower Of Pain, honestly,) shows Danica naked in the Ice Shower trap because the directors were concerned that the original idea of filming her in a wet t-shirt and panties would be seen as "too sexual".
• Trans man Brandon Teena of Boys Don't Cry takes a shower after he has been raped by men who discovered his birth sex, with the camera lingering on shots of his body.
• In The Puppet Masters, the male lead showers after being freed from the control of an alien parasite; he breaks down completely and is comforted by the female lead whilst still naked. Oddly touching but uncomfortably voyeuristic.
• American Beauty: "Look at me, masturbating in the shower. This is the high point of my day. It's all downhill from here."
• In The Brave One, Erica steps into her shower fully clothed the first time she kills a man.
• Naomi Watts has one in the American remake of The Ring.
• In Apt Pupil, the protagonist finds himself showering with holocaust victims.
• Played for Laughs in Ace Ventura Pet Detective, after the titular character realizes that the woman he kissed is a man. He also chews an enormous wad of gum. And burns all his clothes, uses a toilet plunger on his face, and vomits his entire stomach contents.
• Nick takes one after he commits his first murder in Death Sentence.
• In Knowing, Nicolas Cage's character, John, takes one of these after he witnesses a plane crash that was predicted by the list of numbers that predict all the major tragedies from 1959 on.
• One of the deleted scenes of Unbreakable featured Dunn taking a shower after the train crash, but it was removed from the final cut because the director deemed it too emotional for the beginning of the movie.
• In a deleted scene from Hostel Part II, two of the protagonists parody this after a night of drinking when one asks the other to act out a scene from a movie. When one girl asks what scene to act out, the other girl says, "Rape shower!"
• Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins's character in Brit crime flick The Long Good Friday) appears in a shower scene washing the blood off himself after he inadvertently kills his right-hand man Jeff in a fit of rage during a heated argument.
• Marion Crane in Psycho. She takes one after deciding to return to Phoenix, but it is horribly subverted.
• Grace in Once Were Warriors has one of these after she is raped by her uncle. She later commits suicide.
• Sgt. James gets one of these two-thirds of the way through The Hurt Locker in full uniform after getting Eldrige shot.
• Requiem for a Dream: After Marion has prostituted herself for a drug fix, she's seen serenely holding her head underwater and then starts screaming.^note This shot was taken from Perfect Blue; filmmaker Darren Aronofsky bought the rights to the film purely to use that visual.
• Gus Maitland, played by Jeremy Renner in 12 & Holding has a particularly heart-wrenching one.
• The protagonist of A Serbian Film does this at the end of the movie, sitting naked in his shower for an hour, after realizing he had been tricked into committing necrophilia, murdering a woman by decapitation, raping his wife and son, and killing four people in one night while high on cattle aphrodisiac. Yes, this is that kind of movie.
• In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, we see two. At the beginning of the movie, the Thief humiliates a man in front of the restaurant by stripping him and wiping dog excrement on him. The Cook hoses him off and pours a glass of wine for him in a scene that is both surreal and sad. Later, the Wife and Lover escape the Thief by hiding naked in the back of a truck filled with spoiled meat (they were making love and had to hightail it out of there). After they get out and reach safety, they are hosed down in much the same manner.
• In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, specifically the Special Edition and Director's Cut, Roy Neary fears he's cracking up - he's found by his wife fully clothed in the shower, and he is curled up and crying (but his watch still works).
• Heathers. The day after Veronica kills Heather #1 and makes it look like a suicide, she hears other girls in the locker room buzzing about how her death has raised her status even higher. Veronica staggers, still clothed, into the shower. It may look to the others that she's stunned by the news, but it's more because her plan backfired.
• Glenn Close's character in The Big Chill.
  • And her character in the film Jagged Edge, after realizing that she just slept with a murderer — a man who she had successfully defended on charges of killing his wife.
• Daredevil does a pretty exceptional one of these—not only is he brooding, but he pulls out a cracked tooth, broken in a fight, and tosses it down the drain.
• Bill does one of these in Beautiful Boy, very understandably, as his son has just murdered 20-odd people on a college campus and then killed himself.
• Elizabeth Shue's character Sera in Leaving Las Vegas takes one of these after being gang-raped.
• In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the 2011 remake, Lisbeth has one after she is raped by the lawyer Nils Bjurman, who is in charge of any money she may get. She gets him back for it, though.
• In the French film La Moustache, Marc shaves off his moustache, only to find himself in a world where everybody says he never had one. After burrowing in the trash to find the moustache clippings to prove he isn't going insane and showing them to his frightened wife, he calms down and sits in the shower absolutely stunned, allowing the (possible) clippings to get washed down the drain.
• In L!fe Happens, Kim has a good cry in the bath, complete with running mascara, after Nicholas discovers that the baby Kim has been carrying around was actually hers and not her roommate's, and Kim runs out on him.
• In Fire with Fire, Jeremy has one.
• John Harrison or rather, Khan almost had one in Star Trek Into Darkness. Here's J. J. Abrams showing it to Conan O'Brien and the audience on Conan.
• In The Axe the protagonist showers frantically after every murder he commits.
• Disclosure: Tom does this following his encounter with his ex Meredith (she comes onto him in a scene that would have been called Attempted Rape had the genders been reversed), but not wanting to confide in his wife, he tells her that he merely feels "shitty" after a bad day (he was passed over for a promotion).
• Subverted in Stoker, in the creepiest fashion possible. At first, India is crying in the shower after her uncle Charlie kills her attempted rapist. Then, she starts remembering the murder, and masturbates to it.
• Fair Game: After being brutalized by the hunters, Jessica curls up in a ball in the shower and lets the water wash over her. Made even sadder by the pathetic water pressure in the old farmhouse.
• From the Professional Wrestling movie ...All the Marbles: Molly takes one of these after her manager Harry Sears slaps her for spending the night with promoter Eddie Cisco.
• In "Wake Up, Ron Burgundy", a B-movie of the original Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy which tells a different story in the same setting, Ron has one. It lasts for hours and he's fully clothed the whole time.
• Horse Girl: After Sarah's roommate confronts her about her increasingly erratic behavior, Sarah runs into the bathroom and takes a shower, as the camera focuses on her distraught face.
• Midwinter Night's Dream: When Jovana's scared, she runs into the bathroom, turns on the shower, and stands under the water with her clothes on.
• M.F.A.: Not a shower, but after being raped by Luke, Noelle emotionlessly walks into the swimming pool at her apartment building fully clothed and holds herself under the water for a very long time.
• In Boot Camp, Sophie finds Trina in the shower after she has been raped by Logan. Trina screams at her to get out.
• In Big Driver, Tess takes one when she makes it back to her home after her rape. She takes another after she has murdered the rapist: symbolically washing herself clean.
• Cradle of Fear: After her traumatic one-night stand with The Man, Melissa takes a shower and tries to scrub herself clean, which ends with her desperately scratching at her skin with her fingernails.
• Juncture: After killing the child pornographer in San Francisco, Anna returns to her hotel and takes a long shower. On discovering blood on her hands, she furiously scrubs herself clean.
• Jimmie from Jimmie (2008) takes showers to deal with stress, as he finds water soothing. When he becomes overwhelmed in the gym, he runs outside during a rainstorm to achieve the same effect.
• The protagonist of Layer Cake does this after shooting Jimmy Price dead for being a police informant, then he helps himself with whiskey and pills.
• The Meg. Jonas takes a shower after Suyin gives him a What the Hell, Hero? for leaving someone behind to die (and it's not the first time he's had to do this). Things turn comical however when Suyin barges into his room to apologise, only to realise that Jonas is not dressed.
• Mako (2021): After getting home from her embarrassing ordeal at the movie award ceremony, Rana gets into her shower, where she cries while holding herself. Her husband Sherif then joins her to console her.
• Glass Onion: Played for Laughs. Benoit is dealing with the lack of action caused by COVID lockdown by sitting in the bath. According to his partner, he hasn't left the tub for three days when The Call knocks on the door.
• Shall We Play?: Stacy quickly goes into the shower to wash off the word Slut which Matt and his friends had written (while she'd been asleep) on her belly.

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