10 Movie Endings That Left You Speechless

Darren Aronofsky's masterful addiction drama Requiem for a Dream features one of the all-time bleakest endings to any movie, like, ever.

While it might lack the universal stakes of something like Avengers: Infinity War, the personal cost paid by the characters we've been following for the entire film is grave to say the least.

Aronofsky's film is a kinetic build towards a horrifying finale in which each of the central characters' lives is undone by their drug addictions.

Protagonist Harry (Jared Leto) has an arm amputated due to excessive heroin use, his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) pimps herself out to feed her addiction, his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) is imprisoned while going through heroin withdrawal, and worst of all Harry's mother Sara (an Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn) is left catatonic after undergoing electroconvulsive therapy to combat her amphetamine psychosis.

In a mesmerising downer ending - set to Clint Mansell's incredible "Lux Aeterna" - we see each of the four characters curling up into the fetal position amid their dire straits, before Sara imagines a better life for herself and Harry, and the credits solemnly roll.

As inevitable as it is brilliant and completely shattering, it's a rare sort of hopeless ending that basically makes you want to immediately go to sleep.