Once you start any kind of story,it’s best to see it through until the end, especially if you want to come away from something with a full-fledged opinion and all. Some might deem it fair to cite a lack of interest in finishing something as a flaw, but things can turn around as stories progress, and a great ending can elevate a merely middle-of-the-road piece of media to a genuinely good one.
Movies tend to be shorter and easier to consume than say TV shows, books, or video games, so as a medium, it’s generally easier to finish films than those other long-running ways of telling stories. But some movies, because of length, confronting subject matter, or general slowness can be harder to finish than others. These examples show that even great films can prove challenging to finish (or at least watch in one sitting), because everything here – except one – can be called a good film. They’re all challenging and require some level of endurance to get through, but it has to be stressed that a sometimes difficult journey toward a film’s end isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
1’Satantango' (1994)
Director: Béla Tarr
Satantangoisimpressively miserable and relentlessly bleak, not to mention notoriously long. The runtime clocks in at just over seven hours, but even with the epic runtime, it’s hard to call the filman epic in the traditional sense. The story’s relatively contained to one small village, it covers a fairly short amount of time, and there’s a very intentional lack of adventure or explosive drama.
Instead,Satantangois about a community filled with people who are struggling, and the way their lives are made even worse when an ex-member of their community returns, seemingly to swindle the bunch of them in some nefarious way. It’s deliberately slow and aims to immerse viewers in an uncaring, harsh, and oppressively sad world, and so it goes without saying, really, that the tone and length work together to makeSatantangoan exceedingly tough watch.
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2’Christiane F.' (1981)
Director: Uli Edel
Of the variousmovies that explore the challenging topic of drug addiction,Requiem for a Dreamtends to be a contender for the most confronting, and it’s perhaps the most well-known film about addiction that could be described as extreme and uncompromising. But in all honesty, the slightly lesser-known German film,Christiane F., might well be an even more difficult film to watch in its entirety.
Christiane F.focuses on a girl who’s only 14 years old, with the consequences of developing a heroin addiction proving even more harrowing due to her age. Additionally,there’salso a biographical elementtoChristiane F., given it was based on a book about a real-life teenager named Christiane Vera Felscherinow, so knowing the events depicted in the film actually happened makes them naturally harder to watch.
3’Uncut Gems' (2019)
Directors: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
It might be one of thebest movies released by A24, butUncut Gemscan also count itself as one of the most stressful and intense. It’s a look at one man who’s unable to call things quits when it comes to betting on sports and hustling in general, perhaps because he craves the adrenaline rush such things provide, or maybe because he just wants more money. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
Anyway, it sees thedynamic filmmaking duo of theSafdie Brothersoperating at the height of their powers, taking the same kind of relentless tension and uneasy thrills found in 2017’sGood Timeand just dialing them up to breaking point.Uncut Gemshasrelentless uneasy scenes, flawed characters making bad decisions, and (often very loud) non-stop profanity. It’s a blast on one hand, but also an assault on the senses on the other hand, and it’s possible some people might want to tap out before the relatively lengthy runtime of 136 minutes comes to an end.
Uncut Gems
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4’Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' (1975)
Director: Chantal Akerman
Arthouse movies tend to challengeor at least defy certain cinematic conventions, which can make them a little more daunting and/or challenging to watch. Sometimes, you have to be in the right kind of mood to properly appreciate something that’s arthouse, and that feeling is only pushed further when the director of an arthouse film chooses to make things long runtime-wise.
Length is not as much of an obstacle toJeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxellesas it isto the aforementionedSatantango, as this 1975 film is less than half as long (which still works out to almost three-and-a-half hours).Jeanne Dielmanfocuses on one woman doing chores over a handful of days, with her routines changing bit by bit, all building up to… something. Eventually.It’s very slow and wants you to feel the tedium present in its titular character’s life, which means the film – like Dielman’s life – is repetitive and more than a bit boring. It’s unflinching stuff, though; that can’t be denied.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.
5’Come and See' (1985)
Director: Elem Klimov
Come and Seepushesthe war genre to its breaking point, in terms of how bleak and uncompromising a film within such a genre can get. Even calling it anti-war feels like an understatement, because it succeeds in going further than just broadly showing how war is bad. It goes right into the mind of its central character, and does an eerily good job of making you, as a viewer, feel the same sort of torment and madness he does.
LikeChristiane F.,Come and Seetells a story that would ordinarily be very disturbing if centered on adults, but becomes more confronting because the main character is in their early teens at most.Come and Seebuilds slowly, starting off feeling uneasy beforeits final act becomes truly horrific. Along the way, it’s never really easy to watch. It’s incredibly impressive, with the atmosphere it creates and the distressing emotions it inspires, but it’s a hard sit.
Come And See
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6’Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom' (1975)
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Ahorror film as confronting as it is controversial,Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodomis something that hasn’t lost its ability to provoke, potentially offend, and unsettle in the decades since its release. It takes place near the end of World War II, and involves four libertines kidnapping various young people and subjecting them to countless indecent, cruel, and torturous acts.
It lives up to the title by showing such things happening over several months and, at times, it can feel likeSalò, or the 120 Days of Sodomstretches on for closer to 120 days than 120-ish minutes. It has things to say andis thematically/historically interesting and provocative, but the content is also extreme and unrelentingly graphic, so it’s not hard to imagine some people finding it difficult to get to the end of it all.
Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom
7’Grotesque' (2009)
Director: Koji Shiraishi
Like the aforementionedSalò, 2009’sGrotesqueis another film notorious for the amount of graphic torture it features. It’s a stripped-back film that takes place inside a very confined location, for the most part, revolving around a young couple gettingcaptured by a disturbed individual who then makes them his prisoners, and does all sorts ofterrible things to them, both physically and psychologically.
Even going into detail through text – and without accompanying images or videos – would feel like it might have the potential to be upsetting, so if you don’t want to watch it (it would be hard to blame you), you kind of just have to accept that this thing is grim, gory, and unrelenting.Grotesqueis notable here for being difficult to watch and ultimately finish, even with just a 73-minute runtime. It goes far enough that even with things being short, it still requires endurance to sit with until the end.
Grotesque (2009)
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8’Hard to Be a God' (2013)
Director: Aleksey German Sr.
Feeling like a medieval-era film, and perhaps thereby a little bit fantasy, all the while actually beinga work of unusual science fiction,Hard to Be a Godproves hard to categorize and wrap one’s head around. Yet doing so has nothing on the difficulty of watching the film itself, which takes viewers to a planet filled with people who haven’t yet advanced beyond their own Middle Ages.
Hard to Be a Godhas a long runtime for viewers to overcome/conquer, with it clocking in at just shy of three hours. It’s also fairly slow-going, doesn’t have much by way of forward momentum in its narrative, has unlikable main characters, andis generally filled with dirty, violent, unpleasant sights and locales from beginning to end. It makes characters and viewers alikewallow in both mud and misery, but once you come out the other end, you can look back on it all and respect what an odd and singular experience it all was.
Hard to Be a God
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9’Cats' (2019)
Director: Tom Hooper
Entirely failingas a musical moviebut working surprisingly well asa piece of unintentional horror,Catsis a fever dream of a movie and, unlike the aforementioned movies, can be given up on at any point. It’s understandable if one could only take so much of this take onCats, because the original musical is already pretty odd and unlikely to appeal to those who don’t like musicals… but the 2019 version goes much further.
Uncanny is the word of the day when it comes toCats, with its unsettling blending of real-life actors and animation working alongside plenty of odd creative decisions and camera angles to make something that all just feels off. The nightmarish qualities of the movie are memorable and, when viewed a certain way, pretty funny, butit’s also an undoubtedly gross, off-putting, and tremendously repetitive film.
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10’Inherent Vice' (2014)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Famed reclusive authorThomas Pynchongenerally writes the sorts ofbooks that prove challenging to adapt into movies, thoughInherent Vicedid manage to take his novel of the same name and translate it all to screen. Still, it’s one of the more divisivePaul Thomas Andersonmovies, with the story being intentionally confusing, scattershot, and packed with oddball characters.
All the while, the protagonist, a detective namedLarry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), isn’t very good at his job,leading to him spending most of the film lost, dazed, and confused, often all at once; the viewer’s likely to feel the same.Inherent Vicedoes intentionally frustrate and challenge those who choose to watch it (much like the novel has a certain lack of approachability for those who choose to read it), but it’s also easy to admire how hazy, crazy, and unique the film ends up being.
