10 Movie Endings That Left A Sour Taste In Your Mouth

2. The Knife - Funny Games

Michael Haneke's anti-film, Funny Games, embraces one of the nastiest endings in all of cinema and ensures movie-goers with a sour taste that might very well last a lifetime.

Haneke's meta-movie, which essentially punishes its audience for actually sitting down to watch it, concerns two serial killers who turn up at a family home one day and ask to borrow some eggs. Before long, they've taken the family hostage, however, and from that point on the director sets out to deconstruct the relationship between movie-goers and movie violence, whilst subverting each and every genre convention and expectation in sight.

It's the ending that ensures that sour taste, however: after escaping from her captors, the only surviving member of the family, Anna, is taken on board a boat. Haneke, the trickster that he is, shows a close-up of a knife, manipulating us into believing that Anna will grab it and kill her captors. Nope: they casually toss it overboard and drown Anna, only for the film to end with them heading towards a new house to repeat the cycle.

Haneke does all this on purpose, of course - Funny Games is a picture that thrives on its ability to play the audience. But even knowing his agenda doesn't make the ending of Funny Games any less shocking or disturbing to watch; the director wants you to come away from his film soured, yes, but seeing that knife and then watching it fly into the lake is so frustrating that you begin to feel genuine hatred for the man who wrote the scene.