10 Most Emotionally Devastating Movie Moments Of 2015

6. Rachel McAdams Is Suddenly Killed Off - Southpaw

It's rare for a main character to die in the first act of a movie, especially when that character is being played by an A-list actor. Sure, Wes Craven did that (to great dramatic effect) in Scream, having Drew Barrymore bite it before the opening credits even appeared. But horror movies (even those meant to dissect the tropes of the genre) operate with a different set of rules. In a straightforward drama, having your lead actress die before the story even really gets going is a surefire way to upset audiences. And that's exactly what Southpaw did when Rachel McAdams, playing Jake Gyllenhaal's wife, suddenly got offed. First of all, this comes out of frickin' nowhere, following an intense confrontation between Gyllenhaal and his boxing opponent's posse. The whole thing finally blows over and then... wait, what's... what's wrong with her? Is she bleeding? WHY IS SHE BLEEDING? Her childlike pleas of "I wanna go home!" are soul-crushing in their sincerity and hopelessness. And then her sudden transition into reassuring her terrified husband that "it's okay, baby" while surely knowing that it's far from okay is the final kick to the stomach that makes this scene one of the year's most emotionally agonising first acts. Everything that follows is stained with that tearjerking, beautifully acted scene. Apparently, this moment in the script was so devastating that it caused Gyllenhaal to break down in tears while reading it.

''I sat there reading the script and it made me cry when I read it. There were two or three times in the script when I was reading it, where I was just crying. And even when I read other drafts as they did rewrites on the script, I remember I was in a plane and I was reading it in a plane, and I just started to cry and cry, and everybody looked at me."