10 Movies About Death You Need To See Before You Die

5. The Descendants

The Descendants deals a lot with the grief process, and how you say goodbye to someone, and in the case of this film, it focuses on how you make the decision to say goodbye to someone. George Clooney stars as a Hawaiian businessman whose wife is in a coma from a surfing accident. Together with his two young daughters, they have to let her go on their own terms. But there's this element that makes the entire story more complex, because he discovers that his wife had been cheating on him with a real estate agent. How do you grieve someone that you're angry with? How do you come to terms with the fact that you will never be able to get closure, never be able to work through it? He's upset with her and he feels betrayed, but at the same time, she's dying and he misses her. There's a lot of complicated emotions that can go into the grieving process that aren't frequently represented on film. Normally the dead are portrayed as a saint or a villain, but rarely as a human, and the decision to introduce this many shades of grey makes The Descendants one of the most interesting examinations of grief in recent years.