10 Emotionally Gutting Films That Wrecked Their Audiences

Finally, we come to a production from Martin Scorsese, one that veers far away from his typical entries in the crime genre.

Silence is a film the director had wanted to make for a long time and certainly isn't tailored towards a wide movie-going audience. The production takes place in the 17th century as we follow two Jesuit priests Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe (played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver respectively). They journey to Japan in search of their missing mentor and to spread the Christian faith among the populous.

Martin Scorsese's long awaited film showed the brutal treatment of Christianity by the Tokugawa Dynasty, whose ruthless efforts to stamp out the religion are portrayed in a truly horrific manner. Silence is a film about cutting, unrelenting suffering, and yet it presents its issues in a morally ambiguous way, both through the naivety of the priests and the sadism of the shogunate. It's an incredibly slow-moving film, but its impact remains tremendous; the film did very poorly in terms of box office, earning back just over half of its budget, yet it stands tall alongside Scorsese's other masterpieces.

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Did we miss any other soul-destroying productions? Let us know in the comments below