THE MOST Depressing Film - Ever

That sounds like Spawn (1997) IMDB entry

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is not depressing at all. The title says why.

Recently saw One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest for the first time. Don't know why I hadn't seen it sooner as it has some very fine acting indeed.

However, it left me feeling heartbroken. The only other film which made such an impression on me was The Elephant Man.

Which films have made you feel this way?

The setting of the film seems to be a sort of industrial wasteland. Electric lights continually flicker, sewer pipes constantly leak, and a mechanical humming sound is ubiquitous.

Henry Spencer (Nance) is a printer, although, for the length of the film, he is "on vacation". He gives off an air of nervousness, but makes few direct qualms about his life situation. At the start of the film, Henry, who has not heard from his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) for a while, mistakenly believes that she has ended their relationship. He is then unexpectedly invited to have dinner with Mary and her parents at their house. At the dinner he is told that Mary has given birth to a baby after an abnormally short pregnancy. Henry is then obliged to marry her.

Mary and the strange, reptilian-looking baby move into Henry's one-room apartment, but the baby continually cries, which deprives Mary of sleep. This pushes her to breaking point, and she abandons Henry and the baby. After Mary leaves, Henry must care for the baby by himself, and he becomes involved in a series of strange events. These include bizarre encounters with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near), a woman with grotesquely distended cheeks who lives in his radiator (she sings the iconic song "In Heaven"), visions of the ominous Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk), and a sexual liaison with his neighbor, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts).


Henry Spencer.Mysterious worms appear in many of the film's scenes and are often seen as a metaphor for sin, although other interpretations are possible.[citation needed] As a metaphor for sin, their resemblance to sperm cells indicates that the premarital sex that led to the baby was Henry's first and most troubling sin.[citation needed]

The film's title comes from a relatively long dream sequence occurring during the last half hour of the film. In it, Henry's head detaches from his body, sinks into a growing pool of blood on a tile floor, falls from the sky, and, finally, lands on an empty street and cracks open. A young boy (Thomas Coulson) finds Henry's broken head and takes it to a pencil factory, where Paul (Darwin Joston), the desk clerk, is rendered speechless by the gruesome sight and summons his ill-tempered boss (Neil Moran) to the front desk by repeatedly pushing a buzzer. The boss, angered by the summons, yells at Paul, but regains his composure when he sees what the little boy has brought. The boss and the boy carry the head to a back room where the Pencil Machine Operator (Hal Landon Jr.) takes a core sample of Henry's brain and determines that it is a servicable material for pencil erasers. The boy is then rewarded for bringing in Henry's head.

Shortly after waking from this dream, Henry seeks out the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but he finds her at her apartment with another man. The baby then begins to laugh, and Henry takes a pair of scissors and cuts open the baby's bandages, which turn out to be part of its flesh (or simply what is holding all of its organs together). By cutting the bandages, Henry splits open the baby's body and exposes its vital organs. As the baby screams, Henry stabs its heart with the scissors. This causes the apartment's electricity to overload, and as the lights flicker on and off, an apparition of the baby's head, grown to an enormous size, materializes in the apartment. The last scene features Henry being embraced by the Lady in the Radiator, which suggests that, after killing the baby, he may have committed suicide and is now dead.