10 Great Films With Soul-Destroying Endings

In this thinly-veiled pseudo-ripoff of George Orwell’s 1984, we follow an ordinary government-employed nobody (Sam) going about his life in a dystopian authoritarian land.

He dreams of being the hero to rescue a beautiful woman from some nondescript danger and one day he gets the chance to become said hero by righting some of the wrongs of his unfair government.

After meeting Jill, a lady who coincidentally resembles the woman of his dreams and is on a government watch-list, he does everything he can to get closer to her. In the process he takes a promotion purely to get her information which, as it turns out, is frowned upon.

After finally getting together with Jill, he is arrested for treason and taken into a huge cylindrical room to be tortured, where he is also told that Jill died earlier whilst resisting arrest.

Just in the nick of time his resistance buddies come to save the day, killing his torturer and setting him free. However, after a long, chaotic chase sequence Sam falls through a coffin and into a deep abyss, revealing that this whole time his escape has been imagined.

He is still confined to the chair and it’s implied that he was lobotomised, now just living out what he believes is his great escape in his own head.