10 'Comedies' That Were Secretly Really Depressing

8. A Serious Man

To an extent, every Coen brothers film is a comedy. Though working under the guises of different genres, Joel and Ethan have been successfully peddling their brand of offbeat, eccentric humour in every one of their films since Blood Simple. Even darker Coens films like Fargo, which features a man being fed into a wood chipper and coming out as a bloody soup the other end, have had audiences laughing. So when the Coens decided to go full-on comedy for their follow-up to No Country For Old Men (also hilarious), the resulting film would surely turn out to be a laugh riot, right? Wrong - A Serious Man is no regular comedy, but an existential drama based loosely on the the story of Job, a "righteous man" made to suffer by God for no immediately obvious reason. Throughout the course of A Serious Man, the Coens' hero, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), loses his wife to a work colleague, has his position as a school teacher challenged by false accusations of bribery and has his calls for help ignored by the rabbis he's supposed to turn to for peace of mind. Then he gets diagnosed with an unknown illness and his son is faced with an apocalyptic tornado, before the film cuts to black, almost as though even it couldn't take the pointless suffering anymore.