10 Opening Movie Scenes That Wanted To Make You Uncomfortable
4. Vox Lux
The trailers for Brady Corbet's 2018 film Vox Lux primarily sold it as a drama about a troubled pop star, Celeste (Natalie Portman), while largely ignoring its incredibly jolting and disturbing opening scene - and, in a cynical marketing sense, with good reason.
Before we get to the pop star portion of the movie, it begins with a 2000-set prologue in which a young Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) is at school when an active shooter assaults the campus.
The boy guns down Celeste's teacher, and informs Celeste that he's already killed lots of other people around the school.
Celeste nevertheless speaks calmly to him, trying to talk him down from causing any more harm, but just as it seems like she's succeeded, Celeste is shot in the shoulder.
When a SWAT team enters the classroom moments later, we see that the shooter has gunned down the entire class before turning the gun on himself.
Celeste is ultimately one of the few surviving victims, but for a film marketed primarily as an oddball drama about an eccentric artist, nobody expected it to kick off with something so brutal.
That Corbet films it with such brilliantly clinical detachment just makes it that much more chilling.