10 Feel Good Movies With Heartbreaking Hidden Secrets

Sometimes, the feel good factor falls apart as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

Ferris Bueller
Paramount Pictures

With the world the way it is, feel good movies are a necessity. However, sometimes when you peer beneath the surface of a feel good movie, your find it doesn’t actually make you feel very good at all.

Movies which make us cry in a good way or a completely different beast. Lots of people love a good tearjerker, and sometimes a happy ending can make these the most feel good movies of all. On the odd occasion though, a movie can seem sugary sweet, but have a heartbreaking secret hidden in the ending.

The movies here all get very dark indeed when she think about the consequences of their endings. For some, it may be a bit of a stretch but for others, the bleakness of the ending is staring us in the face.

Movies are not reality. That much is obvious, especially with popcorn feel good flicks which weren’t built to stand up to scrutiny. Once you scrutinise them, you’ll see why.

You may never look at these 10 films in quite the same way again. They’re supposed to make you feel happy, but after this it might be lost to you.

10. Forrest Gump

Ferris Bueller
via Paramount Pictures

Forrest Gump is the first Tom Hanks movie of the list, but it won’t be the last. That’s largely because Hanks is such a warm and fuzzy actor that ‘feel good’ is his brand, but also a talented enough actor to make fairly straightforward movies into great masterpieces.

Forrest Gump is probably the best ever example of these two styles colliding, and there’s a lot of layers in the ending.

It ends with Forrest finding out he has a son by Jenny, and endeavouring to raise it all on his own. Though Jenny’s cause of death is never explicitly named, there is a heavy implication that it’s from the big disease with the little name: AIDS/HIV.

That means there is a significant chance that little Forrest Junior was born HIV positive. Already quite a heartbreaking twist on the usually bitter sweet and comforting ending. However Forrest Senior’s mother’s death as another element to the equation too.

Forrest Senior is a very nice man, but he’s not exactly what you would call fatherhood material. People with learning difficulties can be fantastic parents but they usually have a support network around them. Without Jenny or his mother, Forrest may not have that.

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Self appointed queen of the SJWs. Find me on Twitter @FiveTacey (The 5 looks like an S. Do you get it? Do you get my joke about the 5?)