The 10 saddest movies on Prime Video

This list gonna be a real bummer. A downer of epic proportions. The pits. A total and complete nadir of the heart. You wanna see the 10 saddest movies on Prime Video? I sincerely hope you brought a box of tissues with you. You’re gonna need them.

10. Chemical Hearts

Take a messy teen drama like Riverdale and then make it watch the other movies on this list and you’ll get Chemical Hearts. Richard Tanne’s film revolves around high school student Henry Page and his doomed love for the troubled new girl Grace. Grace has had some particularly nasty things occur in her past, and her unhealed wounds make it impossible for her to fully give over to Henry’s affections. This movie is a painful reminder of a lesson we all must learn: you can’t fix anyone, no matter how hard you try.

9. Bones and All

The most profound quote about love I ever heard game from a little video game called God of War: Ragnarok. It goes “the culmination of love is grief”. Ow. It hurts because it’s true. Either you break up with your lover or one of you dies. That’s how it goes. Bones and All certainly doesn’t spare the heartache. It’s a film about two cannibal lovers attempting to survive and eat their fill in a country that (understandably) doesn’t understand them. If they could get there urges under control maybe things would be better, but they just can’t change their tragic, icky natures. The result? They end up with a bellyful of grief.

8. A Walk To Remember

Adam Shankman’s A Walk To Remember is inspired from a book by Nicholas Sparks, so you KNOW it’s gonna be a tearjerker. It’s about a popular high school kid named Landon who falls in love with a sheltered religious girl with a terminal illness. In classic Nicky Sparks fashion, the pair form a tender, aching, and all too short romance that meets its inevitable doom at the film’s conclusion. Not really a spoiler, it is? Given the original author, it’s all par for the sad, sad course. We know it’s coming, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

7. Beautiful Boy

Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy is a story of addiction, a theme which will continue rearing its ugly head in further entries down this list. Based on the memoirs of real life author David Sheff, the film chronicles a dad’s relationship with his son who is suffering with drug addiction. As the film progresses, David’s son’s substance abuse takes a heavy toll on the pair’s loved ones, and David himself falls further into feelings of helplessness and grief. The film is a hard lesson about a hard truth of the world: you can’t fix someone who isn’t willing to fix themselves.

6. Where the Red Fern Grows

You just KNOW it’s gonna be a tearjerker when dogs are involved. Norman Tokar’s Where the Red Fern Grows is about a young boy named Billy who dreams of owning a pair of hunting dogs. After endless time spent saving, Billy is finally able to afford two beloved new pets. Their bond is brief and beautiful, because this is a movie about dogs. And you know what happens to dogs in drama films, don’t you? Since the days of Old Yeller, it never, ever ends the way you want it to.

5. The Notebook

Nick Cassavetes’ The Notebook is the ultimate make-you-sob romance flick. It’s the story of a young couple, Noah and Allie, who fall madly in love in the 1940s. Alas, their romance is tragically challenged by that great sundering of joys: war. The pair manage to find each other again at the conclusion of the Second World War, and are happy for a time – only for Allie to slowly lose her memories of Noah due to dementia. What’s worse than watching someone you love die? Watching them die slowly.

4. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about his Father

Here marks the end of the romantic just-need-a-good-cry films and into the truly bleak. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about his Father is a documentary made by Kurt Kuenne about his deceased best friend Andrew Bagby. Andrew and Kurt were childhood friends who eventually grew distant in college, and Kurt was shocked to learn that his friend had one day been murdered, and that his Andrew’s ex-girlfriend was pregnant with the deceased’s child. The film is a portrait of Andrew through the eyes of his best friend, made for his infant son to understand his father.

3. Women Talking

Content warning for discussion of rape.

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is a truly difficult watch. Set in an isolated Mennonite community, the film features a group of women discovering that the men in the community have been using livestock tranquilizer to render them unconscious and rape them at night. The women hold a meeting and grapple with three decisions: flee the community, stay and fight, or do nothing. The film is inspired by a book of the same name, which in turn was inspired by real-life gas-facilitated rapes in a community of Bolivian Mennonites.

2. Requiem for a Dream

Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is not a good time. It is a dirge—a free fall into the abyss of despair. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t make you weep but rather sink into your seat whispering “oh no … no no no.” The film revolves around four characters whose dreams are slowly, agonizingly crushed as they spiral deeper and deeper into drug addiction. At the end of the film, you might actually feel better about your own life. It probably isn’t as bad as these people have it.

1. The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a harrowing documentary about the mass killings that took place in Indonesia in the 1960s, from the point of view of the death squad leaders who carried them out. Oppenheimer interviews these killers and has them reenact their actions in the style of their favorite Hollywood movies. The sadness of the film comes from its unflinching look at the human capacity for evil. The death squad leaders recount their murderous exploits with pride, nonchalance, and in a select few cases … regret.