10 Harrowing Movies That Will Crush Your Soul

Quite often, a film's quality is assessed based on how much people enjoyed it, and while that's a good way to measure a picture's success, it would be reductive to apply this to all movies. There are an awful lot of films out there that are really great, yet it would be difficult to call them enjoyable. Many are thought-provoking and artistically excellent but thanks to their grim subject matter, they're not exactly fun to watch. 

The following ten movies are a great example of this. They are all absolutely tremendous features that everyone should watch, but it's unlikely many will want to watch them again. All ten of them cover a serious issue or tragic real-life story, and by being so hard-to-watch, they brilliantly hammer home their messages and themes. 

They will make you think, they will make you reflect on the world, and they will most likely make you cry. They will crush your soul, and yet, thanks to just how astoundingly good they are, they will also leave you feeling alive. Thus, these movies being so upsetting is one of their greatest strengths. 

Kicking things off with a relatively recent war movie classic...

Kicking off the list is All Quiet on the Western Front, a monumental German-language war film which is based on the legendary anti-war novel of the same name, previously adapted by Hollywood in 1931. Technically speaking, this iteration of All Quiet is a war movie, but to be blunt, it plays out more like a fully-fledged horror flick.

A gore-soaked, mud-splattered nightmare in which all of the major characters die - frequently in maddeningly avoidable ways, no less - this is an almost unbearably intense watch. Most war pictures make every effort to depict war as hell, but here, in many scenes, it really does feel like its young soldiers are in the midst of hell itself.

Alongside the film's visceral intensity, it offers disturbing thematic commentary on war itself and the way war-mongering elites thoughtlessly sacrifice millions of soldiers. The war machine at work is shown ever so well in All Quiet's opening, where its lead characters are given recycled uniforms from previously killed soldiers. 

This 2022 movie further hammers this home with a completely maddening ending (in a good way) that sees an arrogant German general order one final attack just before 11 o'clock on Armistice Day; protagonist Paul (Felix Kammerer) dies seconds before the end of the war. This is the cherry on top of a completely miserable viewing, one made even more distressing by all the wars waging around the world right now. 

All Quiet on the Western Front might be set over a century ago, but it's as relevant as ever.