13 Intense Movie Performances That Are Incredibly Difficult To Watch

13. Charlize Theron - Devil's Advocate

If ever there was cause to doubt that getting between the devil and his quarry was a particularly bad idea, the perfect answer comes with Charlize Theron's astonishingly visceral portrait of despair as Mary Ann Lomax in the exceptionally affecting supernatural thriller from Taylor Hackford.

The Devil's Advocate did a lot of things right; casting Al Pacino as the devil, extracting a solid, atypically varied performance by Keanu Reeves, and chiefly bringing in Theron as Reeves' small-town wife, who finds herself an unwitting pawn in the devil's play to start a family and end the world. As her husband is swept up in a meteoric rise to success at Pacino's law firm (a cunning, and barbed front for his devilish activities), Mary Ann begins to suspect something is wrong, and her suspicions are dismissed as psychosis - something that the devil plays on to get rid of her.

The arc that takes Mary Ann from bright-eyed country girl to broken, suicidal victim is grimly extreme, and it is her final moment - when she offers a final note of love to Reeves before slitting her own throat that leaves the biggest scar in an entertainingly haunting film.