I love sad films. I love to surrender myself to a well-made depressing film with bleak, hopeless worlds that can emotionally wreck me. My heart sinks when I see tragic things happening to extremely sad characters, to the point where it physically and emotionally lingers on me for days after watching the film. And yet I find myself being drawn to them again and again. Why do we watch sad films?

I started thinking about this when I saw Oslo, August 31st recently. This film about a man trying to adjust to a life after recovery from addiction is possibly one of the most tragic films ever made. It’s also one of the best films made about depression and addiction. It left me feeling miserable, but at the same time fulfilled a strange desire within me which I didn’t even realise existed in the first place. It was almost as if I found catharsis in the character’s suffering, and I felt terrible about it.

But it’s deeper than that. There are 4 possibilities. First is that the bleak, hopeless world of the film on some level offers you a realistic portrait of the world we live in, and you find catharsis in that. Hope is a tricky thing, and sometimes being offered hope without reason can be counterintuitive. Sometimes you don’t need hope, you need someone to tell you that there’s no real or objective hope or meaning in the world we live in. All you can do is create your own meaning and make decisions that are right for yourself.

Second is that watching films is one of the only times you allow yourself to be sad. As we progressively grow into a society that suppresses emotions and real connections, we don’t allow ourselves enough opportunities to feel emotions that are vital for our survival. We turn to our phones as soon as we have a semblance of an uncomfortable emotion, and that’s given us infinitely more chances to avoid our feelings. But when we watch films, we let ourselves be vulnerable again. We let ourselves immerse in a world that’s detached from phones and from reality. We can feel sad without guilt again, we can feel angry without arguments again, we can feel disgusted without judgement again. Cinema becomes the safe space for our emotions.

Third, and the more controversial one, is that we find pleasure in the pain. Even if we cry and feel genuine sorrow for the character, there is a sense of intrinsic fulfilment that we derive from it. Maybe it’s a mild, hidden form of masochism or sadism that exists within all of us, which either derives pleasure from our own sadness or someone else’s, and cinema becomes a socially acceptable way to experience it. Or maybe it makes us feel better about ourselves as we see stories of people struggling with tragedies much greater than ours.

Fourth, and maybe the most common one, is that sad films allow us to be sad about things that we otherwise refuse to acknowledge, accept or confront in the real world. I have lost people to addiction, & I still have people who are in a losing battle with it while their loved ones live through it hopelessly. The weight of the tragedy of it has consumed me so much over the course of my life that I never gave myself the space to grieve it. I finally found it in this film. And that’s why we need sad films. That’s why we watch sad films.

Finally, here’s a list of some of the saddest films that I have seen, and I would recommend you to watch : 1. Aftersun (2022) 2. Atonement (2007) 3. Oslo, August 31st (2011) 4. Masaan (2015) 5. October (2018) 6. Pyaasa (1957) 7. Breaking The Waves (1996) 8. Manchester By The Sea (2016) 9. Three Colours: Blue (1993) 10. Taste Of Cherry (1997) 11. Blue Valentine (2010) 12.Requiem For A Dream (2000) 13. The Father (2020) 14. Amour (2012) 15. A Ghost Story (2017) 16. Shame (2011) 17. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) 18. Happiness (1998) 19. Sapta Sagaradaache Ello - Side A (2013) 20. Beautiful Boy (2018)