10 Movie Endings That Left A Sour Taste In Your Mouth

Plenty of films choose to end on sad, depressing or downbeat notes, but an ending that sends you home with a sour taste in your mouth... well, that's a different beast entirely.

A truly sour ending has the power to linger on and on, of course, stuck to your palate for days, weeks, months or years afterwards. You don't often forget them.

Here are 10 such endings, all of which - for a number of unnerving reasons - inspired a foul taste...

10. The Diner - The Lobster

It's not really all that surprising that The Lobster has a sour ending, given that it was written and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, a filmmaker who specialises in leaving you cold.

This vasty weird absurdist black comedy, The Lobster, has Colin Farrell as a singleton named David who checks into a hotel and has 45 days to find a partner - or be condemned to life as an animal (in this case, the lobster of the title). Eventually, he runs away and joins a group of rebels living in the woods, before finally falling in love with Rachel Weisz.

After Weisz's character is blinded, the pair flee into a dystopian City, where the film culminates on a scene that sees David in a diner toilet, preparing to blind himself with a table knife. It's deeply disturbing and awkward, mainly because we don't get to witness him actually going through with it (although it is heavily suggested that he will and does).

It's an uncomfortable way to end the film, but the most disconcerting thing about it stems from the fact that David's reasoning is never mentioned; he just decides to blind himself, presumably as a means of reconnecting with Weisz' character after they've started to drift apart. And yet doing the deed in a diner toilet - and with a table knife, no less - highlights the sad extent that a person will go to in order to feel connected to somebody.

It's that cruel realisation that gives the The Lobster's ending an abrasive edge.