10 So-Called Sad Movie Endings That Are Happier Than You Think

A movie's ending - more than any other component of the story - is most likely to provoke the strongest response from the viewer. 

It's easy to get swept up in the emotion of a story's ending, and as such, it can be easy to misread it in the moment. One of the most notable examples of this is Whiplash: there were plenty of anecdotes of viewers so caught up in the euphoric intensity of that movie's finale that they misread the ending as a happy one. 

Of course, when you take a step back, you realise it was anything but.

There are plenty of so-called happy endings that are considerably grimmer than they first look, but what about sad endings that are secretly happy? Well, there are quite a few of those out there too.

The endings vary quite a bit. Some are more bittersweet than they're sometimes given credit for, while others are karmic conclusions that the film's characters actually deserved, offering their own kind of catharsis. One is even based on a true story that had a happier ending later on. Nevertheless, if these movies make you sad, here's a little something to cheer you up...

This one is a major outlier. The true story Memories of Murder adapts did have something approaching a happy ending, it's just that said ending emerged long after the film's story concludes.

Memories of Murder, an excellent early effort from Bong Joon-ho, is based on the Hwaseong Serial Killings, which were South Korea's first confirmed serial murders. In 2003, which is when the film out, the murders remained unsolved and protagonist Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) is left haunted by his failure to bring the killer to justice.

The movie ends with Park stopping by where he found the first victim and a local girl mentions that she once saw a man, strongly implied to be the real killer, looking in and reminiscing about something he did a long time ago. Park asks what he looked like, to which the girl replies he was entirely ordinary-looking. Then, in one of the most memorable final shots of the 2000s, Park breaks the fourth wall and stares right into the camera, looking for the killer among the audience. 

Well, Memories of Murder is a less depressing watch now because the murders were eventually solved, with an incarcerated man confessing to the killings in 2019. Therefore, it's comforting to think that Park and the other police characters would've eventually found some semblance of peace. At least, one hopes so.