10 Movies You Never Expected To Have A Happy Ending
7. The Road
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of the grimmest books you'll ever read, and its movie adaptation largely followed suit. Though not nearly as powerful as the source material, this is still a solid adaptation that does its best to capture the overwhelming bleakness of the novel, thus ensuring that its vision of the apocalypse is one of the darkest ever put to film.
The America that the unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travel through is a barren, miserable hellscape. There are still people around, but most of them are dangerous, and some of them are even cannibalistic. Humanity isn't extinct, but it seems like only a matter of time before this happens.
As such, when The Road ends on a fairly hopeful note, that was quite the pleasant shock for those who hadn't read the novel (which ends in the same way). The father becomes ill and dies, but another family, one who are safe and trustworthy, takes the boy under their wing. This might've seemed like a cop-out for some, but, regardless of how out-of-left-field it was, it was needed. After such a completely miserable story, viewers sorely needed just a bit of light.