10 Incredible Movies You'll Never Watch Again (And Why)

9. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2008)

There is no sense denying the fact that The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is effective in its twisty agenda to make you feel even the slightest sense of the enormity of the horrors of the Holocaust, but it’s not something you’d ever want to revisit recreationally.

Part of the problem of the story, which adapts John Boyne’s same-titled book about two 8-year-old boys on either side of an extermination camp’s barbed wire, is that when you’ve heard it, it loses its impact. And it only loses its impact because it is so deeply, horrifyingly traumatic.

You’re led to feel some slight flicker of hope that young Shmuel will get out and he and Bruno can reclaim their “normal” lives, but then the actual ending drains every ounce of positivity out of you as both boys end up dead. And not only is it sad, but it invites you to only feel some vague, perverse triumph in the fact that Bruno’s father, one of the camp’s commanders pays for his almost flippant inhumanity with his son’s life - and feeling that is awful in itself.