10 Utterly Devastating Film Endings That Totally Came Out Of Nowhere
9. Forrest Gump - Jenny's Death
Forrest Gump lives in infamy as the film which deprived Pulp Fiction of the Best Picture Oscar, but you'd be a fool if you cant see its quality. Sure, it's not as good as the competition it beat out, but Gump's adventures through the touchstones of American history is full of whimsy, fun and schmaltzy life lessons about boxes of chocolate. Really, it's just a happy film.
However, there's a spanner in the works, and that spanner is called Jenny.
If we objectively look at how Jenny treats Forrest sending him mixed messages, spurning him when he's trying to help, throwing herself on his charity before spectacularly dumping him we can see that shes quite a terrible person underneath all that niceness. But it's what she does at the end that really takes the biscuit.
Namely, she dumps a child on Forrest and promptly dies. While it's a shock, Forrest is quietly thrilled at having a son, even if he didn't know of his presence for the last four years(!). But it's the fact that Jenny just goes and straight-up dies that sits so royally at odds with the film's tone. Granted, his mother died just after the halfway point of the film, but she was old and it was to be expected. However, the fact Jenny just bit the dust with only cursory explanations toward her illness was just a massive twist of the knife.
In a film this sweet, you half-expected them to end up happy and together when she finally sorted herself out, but no, she ends up in the great beyond and Forrest ends up heartbroken.
It's made even worse by the fact that Jenny probably would never have told Forrest about his only son if she wasn't dying.