10 Movies That Totally Destroyed You
3. La La Land
Musicals tend to be uplifting affairs, filled as they are with singing, dancing, and an overabundance of joy.
La La Land does, to an extent, carry this same feeling, from the sun-drenched opening number to the swooning romance between Emma Stone’s Mia and Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian. However, just when it looks poised for things to go the way you want - the way you’d _expect_ them to - Damian Chazelle pulls the rug from under you and rips out your heart on the landing, with the reveal that Mia and Seb don’t end up together.
The trick to making this land with such impact is that they've already broken up once, so you're thinking they're guaranteed to end up together. It’s Old Hollywood; it’s nothing can hurt you when it's in technicolour; it's Golden Age romance; it's another day of sun, a city of stars, where everything is bright and shiny and happy and then BOOM.
All of a sudden you're on the floor, the wind knocked out of you, and it's beating you about the face like Jon Snow hitting Ramsay Bolton in Battle of the Bastards.
Ryan Gosling gives you a look, a nod, and it shatters your very existence.