5. The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky isn't a conventional film-maker, and The Wrestler makes this incredibly apparent. Yet coming off the back of depressing the bejesus out of us in Requiem For A Dream and weirding us out in The Fountain, The Wrestler seemed decidedly conventional. It was earthy, relatable and at its heart, featured a fundamental message about a down-and-out protagonist who wanted to get his life back together. As Rocky proved, we all love an underdog story, so we piled into the cinema expecting some more resurrecting film magic. Yet again, this is Aronofsky, so we really should've known better than to expect things to go quite this way. Sure, we all anticipated something formulaic, and for the longest time it seems as if this is the way the film might play out. Randy 'The Ram' Robinson goes through all those stereotypical story beats he starts out in a dead-end job (he works the deli counter at a supermarket) and wants to re-capture the old glories. He makes an effort to re-establish relations with his estranged daughter and hopes to hook up with a nice woman in a similar state of impending obsolescence. He's given a final big break in a reunion bout celebrating his biggest match against the wholly un-PC-named The Ayatollah. All of this is obvious, but who cares? We come to movies to be entertained and to have our hearts lifted, and buoyed by Mickey Rourke's stellar performance, we had a protagonist we could really root for. So imagine the shock when Randy goes and pisses it all up the wall, thoroughly gut-punching an audience which might've expected something different and uplifting. The woman decides against a relationship with out sympathetic grappler, he lets his daughter down again and he (probably) dies in the ring from his heart complications. What makes it worse is that the movie tragically celebrates this demise with the same delusional viewpoint of Randy himself, giving the whole final tragedy something of a triumphalist bent. It's all incredibly sad, and what makes it sadder is that we really weren't expecting it.