10 Most Unexpectedly Tragic Endings To Otherwise Fun Movies

3. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

On the surface, Alfonso Cuaron's wonderful road movie - about two teenage boys and an older women who set out to find an idillic beach paradise in Mexico - is a entirely funny one, filled with great scenes of dialogue and chemistry between its leading actors. It's also an incredibly sexy movie, and one that carries itself to its final scenes on much "let's throw caution to the wind" philosophising - watching the movie, most people would probably take the trip outlined Y Tu Mamá También, given the chance. It's only really in the last moments of the movie that the mood switches, and Cuaron seems intent on bringing his characters back to reality. After teenagers Julio and Teloch end up sharing an intimate moment with one other during a drunken night, they head home, leaving their female companion, Luisa, to stick around alone. A narrator then tells us that the pair lost their girlfriends upon returning home, and stopped seeing one another. In a scene set a year later at a coffee shop, a chance encounter reunites the pair, but the meeting is awkward. We then learn that these former best friends never saw each other again after their encounter here, and that Luisa has died from cancer - she was aware that she had it when she agreed to take the trip with them in the beginning, presumably as a way of enjoying her last days. A sad, unexpected and rather blunt coda for an otherwise life-affirming movie, no doubt, but one that ultimately inflicts the movie with a strange, almost dream-like sense of melancholia.