Tis the Season to Be Miserable: 5 Christmas Movies That Are Depressing AF
Most people select movies that give them warm and fuzzy feeling to watch on Christmas.
But what about connoisseurs of drama and darkness, who would rather prefer to spend their evening with something disturbing or depressing? They may be not as numerous, but there still are movies catering at them.
Let's look at five examples, in no particular order of their depressiveness.
5. Mixed Nuts (1994)
The movie describes several hours on Christmas Eve in a crisis hotline center, which workers have only a bit less issues than the sort of people who call crisis hotlines. While it contains plenty of (black) humor, its impressive cast (Adam Sandler, Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Madeline Kahn) did their best to make the movie very depressing overall.
4. Joyeux Noël (''Merry Christmas'') (2005)
This is a war drama loosely based on the Christmas truce of December 1914, depicted through the eyes of various Frenchmen, British, and Germans. While nearly all the characters survive until the credits, which is uncommon for a war drama set during World War I, endings for most of them are various degrees of depressing.
3. A Christmas Tale (2008)
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Another mix of black comedy and drama. While "a dysfunctional family meets for the holidays" is a pretty common setup for Christmas movies, normal Christmas movies do not continue it with "…to find out that that the matriarch of the family has acute leukemia." While the ending is not completely miserable, there are no miracles of healing and reconciliation, either.
2. A Midnight Clear (1992)
A war drama, but set during World War II this time. An attempt to reproduce a Christmas truce on the small-group scale during the Battle of the Bulge is bound to go wrong, as you can guess from the film's inclusion on this list.
1. The Family Man (2000)
Christmas miracles and chances to fix your life's errors are a thing, at least in Christmas movies, right? Right?
Well, The Family Man plays with that idea… as well as with the idea that the best way to hurt a man is to give him something good, only to yank that good thing away. There is a glimmer of hope at the very end, so this movie is not 100% depressing, but its main message is "You just have to live with consequences of your old mistakes."