Why Do We Endure The Ordeal Of Watching Grim Movies?

Feeling too chirpy this Easter? Why not watch one of three movies currently in cinemas? The Homesman is an American western; Mommy is a Québécois family drama; Leviathan is a Russian political thriller. All three are powerful and accomplished. They’re also pretty emotionally gruelling.

Intuitively, cinematic pleasure lies in fantasy and imagination: immersing us in other, beautiful worlds rather than rubbing our noses in the ugliness of our own. So, where’s the enjoyment in grim movies?

By ‘grim’, I don’t just mean those irritatingly dominant buzzwords ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’, which prime us to expect angst-ridden protagonists navigating a grungy, hostile world, but who struggle against their circumstances in a heroic, badass way.

A grim film’s heroes don’t prevail. Their shit world brings them down. Grim movies aren’t sentimental ‘tearjerkers’, as melodramas are. Indeed, there’s a provocative lack of sentimentality in their storylines. They ask audiences to accept suffering, injustice and cosmic indifference as an immovable status quo.

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Are Grim Films Cathartic?

Having heard festival buzz that Xavier Dolan’s drama Mommy was ‘harrowing’ and a ‘tough watch’, I steeled myself for grim drama. But while some scenes were disturbing, I was surprised by how exuberant and tender the film was. Is this catharsis?

Aristotle invented this metaphor in his Poetics, likening the vicarious “terror and pity” aroused by watching tragedy to a medical purging procedure: it cleanses our psyches of negative emotions that may otherwise sicken us. Psychoanalysts see catharsis as a ‘release valve’ for ‘unhealthy’ emotions. But where do those emotions go? What do we do with them?

Literary critics argue that catharsis makes us better people: by identifying with a tragic protagonist, we accept tragedy as an essential element of human experience. And theologians suggest catharsis offers us moral training: stories of psychic pain (such as the martyrdom of saints) provide templates for how to conduct ourselves honourably under duress. WWJD?

In a key neuroscientific study in 2004, Israeli researchers monitored people’s brains as they watched the first half-hour of the spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Interestingly, the viewers’ eye movements across the screen were quite similar, and the parts of their brains that process logical stimuli behaved in an almost synchronised way. The researchers called this communal sensory experience “intersubjectivity”.

Perhaps our intersubjective response to striking images and plot twists makes us feel closer to other people as we watch grim movies. I still remember the collective gasp in the cinema at a key point in Thomas Vinterberg’s gruelling 2012 drama The Hunt. It comforted me to recognise that others were as outraged by the unfairness of the moment as I was. Collective moral outrage is an ironic response, really, considering the film is about a smalltown witch-hunt stemming from a child’s innocent lie.

One cruel 2009 experiment, in which participants watched a father explain his infant son’s terminal cancer, also reveals that sad movies elevate our levels of oxytocin, the brain chemical that’s often associated with feelings of intimacy. We begin to feel a closeness and empathy for the people we’re watching.

In another 2012 study, university students reported on their emotional states before, during and after watching Atonement. Interestingly, participants who reported feeling happiest used the onscreen tragedy to reflect not their own lives, but their close relationships, cherishing them anew.

Perhaps Mommy is cathartic because it’s explicitly about relationships. We watch spirited single mother Diane (Anne Dorval) struggle to parent her violent yet needy teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), whose closeness to her is weirdly semi-erotic. Their claustrophobic dynamic is broadened by a new friendship with enigmatic neighbour Kyla (Suzanne Clément), whose history and motives are murky.

In certain key moments, Dolan deliberately marshals his medium to create explicitly cathartic effects. At one point, the film’s square aspect ratio stretches exuberantly to suggest the family’s new horizons. And in another heartbreaking sequence, Diane fantasises about watching Steve grow into a successful, well-adjusted man. It’s a warm blur, a memory that doesn’t exist.

Some viewers interpret the film’s ending pessimistically, but I read it as full of hope and possibility. This reminded me of my response to the ambiguous ending of John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009). Rather than a child being delivered into the hands of sinister strangers, I saw it as an affirmation of the necessity for human relationships.

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Feeling Good About Being A ‘Conscious’ Cinemagoer

Tommy Lee Jones’ western The Homesman stars Hilary Swank as a determined 1850s frontierswoman who volunteers to drive a wagon of mentally ill women across harsh terrain, and Jones as a grizzled drifter who reluctantly agrees to accompany her. It continues a tradition of historical revisionism in the western genre – galvanised by Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven – that has led audiences to expect ‘darkness’ and ‘grittiness’. We see the past as awful in order to imagine our own era is more enlightened.

Aristotle’s famous teacher Plato was not into catharsis. He believed it encouraged audiences to wallow uncritically in their emotions. Poets would not be allowed in Plato’s Republic, because “we give ourselves over to following the imitation; suffering along with the hero in all seriousness, we praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in this state”.

Do we elevate grim movies as masterpieces because they move us seriously, in a way that feels more ‘worthy’ than a blockbuster romp? Do we enjoy an insight into human nature that feels genuine where multiplex fun is cheap and bogus? It’s a snobbish view, but while tragic melodramas often appear on box-office blockbuster lists, grim films are almost invariably considered arthouse and festival fare.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht felt catharsis makes bourgeois audiences complacent. Rather than just making audiences feel their feels, Brecht wanted to provoke them to recognise and act against injustice. This is the social realist tradition in which films such as Ken Loach’s acclaimed yet deeply upsetting Kes operate.

Like Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010), The Homesman can be interpreted as a feminist western, because it disrupts dominant ideas of the Old West as masculine terrain, viewing the harshness of pioneer life from a woman’s perspective. The Homesman’s unexpected, seriously grim turn in its third act seems deliberately to forestall any sentimental visions of sharp-shootin’, sarsaparilly-quaffin’ Calamity Janes.

Going into Andrey Zvyagintsev’s drama Leviathan, which was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film, I was expecting a Russian equivalent to The Wire: an exploration of systemic corruption and moral hypocrisy. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) recruits his big-city lawyer friend Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) to save his coastal home from a land grab by the odious, corrupt mayor (Roman Madyanov). But disaster awaits Dmitriy, Kolya, his son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) and pretty wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova).

Again, I wasn’t prepared for how unrelentingly grim the film gets. Judeo-Christian culture has trained us to barrack for Job, and for David over Goliath, but Leviathan laughs at the idea that God ever loved Job, and that David could ever win.

Zvyagintsev’s cynicism is bold and exhilarating. Leviathan seems to reveal a great truth stripped bare, like the bleached whale skeleton that provides the film’s motif. We may not know how to combat injustice, but seeing grimness depicted so unflinchingly can be starkly beautiful. It feels… good.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She tweets at @incrediblemelk.