12 Controversial Movie Endings That Came Out Of Nowhere

2. The Dwarf - Don't Look Now

Don't Look Now, Nicolas Roeg's occult masterpiece, tells the story of a couple - played wonderfully (and realistically) by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie - who retreat to Venice during the down season after the death of their child. The atmosphere is creepy and weird from the offset, with Roeg painting a Venice you almost certainly wouldn't want to visit, packed with odd characters, fog-covered back alleys... and a manic killer on the loose. Across the span of the film, Sutherland's character, John, experiences a series of strange sights and encounters - the most haunting of which sees a hooded figure wearing a red coat running through the streets, a figure he believes to be his dead daughter. In the final climatic scene, John catches up to the small hooded figure after spotting it during an evening walk, who is revealed to be... a homicidal dwarf. The dwarf turns, slashes John's throat, and kills him. It turns out that John was seeing visions of his own death all along, but who could have expected that figure to be such a hideous monster? It's a strange, unnerving ending that still remains hugely controversial today for its highly cryptic and frankly disturbing nature. For one, the use of a dwarf as a "symbol of evil" was frowned upon by many viewers at the time, whilst the sequence itself was deemed to be extremely upsetting for its violent content. Hard to deny its sheer shock factor though.