(Credits: Far Out)
Sun 26 April 2026 16:15, UK
There are so many great movies out there, but we just can’t seem to help coming back to the same ones. We love familiarity, creature comforts, and some of us can admit to having watched a movie tens of times, gaining the same level of satisfaction with every viewing.
Then there’s the movies you watch, love, but decide you’ll never watch again. I remember the one and only time I watched Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I remember it well. My then-boyfriend was going through an obsession with transgressive cinema (it was with him that I also watched Martyrs, another movie it’ll probably take me a long time to want to re-watch), and while I’d always had Saló on my list, I knew that I’d likely never get round to it on my own. But wielding a copy of the Blu-Ray, he presented a rather twisted idea for a movie date night.
I was only about 20, and while I appreciated the political allegory and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unflinching vision, I couldn’t get those final minutes out of my head, when torture is taken to the utmost extreme and bodies are completely desecrated. Every time I ate chocolate for months after that, my ex would say “Mange! Mange!” like they did in the shit-eating scene. I can’t say I’ll be rewatching Salò anytime soon, despite appreciating it as a piece of cinema.
I’m sure a lot of people are in the same boat as me, but, what movie is the one most likely to be named when someone is asked to suggest a movie they love but wouldn’t watch again? Saló is definitely up there for many people, I’m sure, as would be titles like Cannibal Holocaust, A Serbian Film and Pink Flamingos – all of which vary in quality but, at least when it comes to content, feature similar levels of grossness.
According to StephenFollows, who carried out a study to discover the answer, it’s movies like Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, both Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark and Antichrist, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and Elem Klimov’s Come and See that rank pretty high. But beating them all is Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, and it’s hardly a surprising winner. Who can forget that ending?
It seems like the movies that rank on the list are those that just deliver utterly relentless awfulness, bombarding the audience with images and themes that are just completely beyond the realm of comfortability. While Pink Flamingos, for example, is pretty gross, it’s also funny, and it’s not ‘bleak’ in the same way that something as hopeless as Come and See is, which is perhaps why it didn’t make the list.
Meanwhile, Irreversible, for example, just doesn’t let up on showing graphic violence and sexual assault, it’s camera continuously moving and disorientating, and the music pounding (complete with sound design intended to make audiences feel sick), so it’s no wonder it often appears on such lists. But Requiem for a Dream arguably takes the torment of its audience one step further by tapping into the darkest depths of the human condition at its lowest, depicting the fates of several drug addicts.
In one horrific scene, we see Marion forced into prostitution, unwillingly having sex with another woman while a group of men watch on. Meanwhile, the other characters are in similar states of complete despair, their bodies weak, lifeless, their eyes completely soulless. Drugs tear these people apart, and Requiem for a Dream is unrelenting in its depiction of the dangers of losing oneself to addiction.
With drugs such a common recreational habit, I guess Requiem for a Dream hits a little too close to home for many, warning audiences of just how easy it is to fall into a complete state of disaster that you can’t come back from.
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