5 movies with a shocking plot

From time to time we need movies with a powerful plot. Stories that awaken our curiosity, empathy or make our hair stand on end and that they do not leave us indifferent.

Can a story about motherhood surprise us? Or maybe just any love movie? The answer will be in how well the plot is woven and in the construction of the characters.

Next, we suggest a series of films that do not have an unusual theme, but that are capable of hooking us into the plot.

1. Loveless, by Andrey Zvyagintsev

The film is about a Russian couple going through an unfriendly divorce, in which disrespect and aggressiveness are constant. The first scene already gives us an idea of ​​the critical point that has been reached in the divorce process.

They need to sell what has been their apartment and start a new life with their respective partners. The contempt they feel for each other lives up to the film’s title.

All this wouldn’t be so dramatic if their 12-year-old son was not suffering from the abandonment and contempt of both of them. They are both going to try not to “stay” with him, understanding that it is a burden to start a new life.

We watch the little boy cry uncontrollably after his parents’ brutal fight, while something breaks in us. It makes us think about the extreme vulnerability of childhood and how there are moments that can break a human being’s entire life. After several days in which his parents live with their respective partners, the child disappears.

There begins a search in which director Zvyagintsev establishes a parallel between the moral misery of the boy’s environment and that of his country. A boldness that has put him in the crosshairs of the Russian authorities and Vladimir Putin’s entourage for the “bad propaganda” that his works make of the country.

2. I love you to death, by Anthony Jaswinski

This review is a double recommendation. Based on a true story that shocked American society. Its screen adaptation has also been carried out by the magnificent series The Act that you can see on Amazon Prime.

However, if you cannot watch the eight episodes of this production, the Netflix film inspired by the same story that we recommend in this article is a good option to find out what happened. If we talk about films with shocking plots, this one has double merit for being based on a real case.

I love you to death (Love You to Death in English); is based on the heartbreaking story of Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard. Gypsy Rose is a girl forced to pretend to be sick under the draconian regime imposed by her mother. His mother suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Abuse through the invention of diseases

In this psychological disorder, the child’s primary caregiver, often the mother, simulates symptoms or provokes real symptoms to appear ill. The film dramatizes the true story and retells the story of severe physical and psychological abuse.

Oscar-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden plays Camille, the seemingly perfect mother who takes great care of her sick daughter, Esme – played by Emily Skeggs -.

For the first quarter of an hour of the film, the story is told from Camille’s point of view, projecting the image of the perfect mother. However, When the film changes to be told from Esme’s perspective, the viewer discovers a web of lies.deception, manipulation and abuse.

Camille forces Esme to pretend to be sick to get a grant. Esme enters a relationship with a boy, who agrees to help her escape. Together, they murder Camille in cold blood and flee the city. The police find Camille lying in a pool of blood and soon arrest Esme, who tells a story of profound psychological torture.

3. Help, by Marc Munden

Selecting films with a shocking plot, we find the recent prominence of the current situation and its still unknown effects on people’s jobs or mental health.

Healthcare workers, sudden but fast-consuming heroes, have experienced stressful situations that have pushed their physical and psychological abilities to the limit. After the great pandemic, restrictions, attacks, deaths of colleagues and forgetfulness of the administrations; The strength of the healthcare people is broken. And we still don’t know what effect this will have on their health and ours, which depends on theirs.

This movie dares to deal with a topic so recent and painful that it gives rise to an essential audiovisual product, especially for certain groups.

The story begins with an interview of protagonist Sarah, star Jodie Comer (Killing Eve). Sarah is a determined and intelligent woman, but she never fit in, neither in formal education nor at work. Her family tells her she will never amount to anything, but she unexpectedly finds her calling as a caregiver. at Bright Sky Homes, a small nursing home.

Sarah has a special talent for connecting with residents, including one in particular, Tony (Stephen Graham), 47, who has a type of early-onset Alzheimer’s. His illness causes periods of confusion and violent outbursts that the other staff members cannot handle, but with Sarah he begins to build a real bond.

Sarah’s success in handling Tony and the other patients helps restore her self-confidence. After this period of adaptation comes March 2020. Suddenly, everything Sarah has achieved is called into question with the arrival of the pandemic.

She and her colleagues fight tirelessly tooth and nail, ill-equipped, ill-prepared and seemingly helpless by the powers that be.

A determined Sarah goes to great lengths to protect those in her care, whose conditions make her suffering and isolation even more traumatic. However, the staff’s unwavering commitment, compassion and heroic efforts can only do so much and Sarah desperately searches for a way out for one of the inmates.

4. The Stone of Patience, by Atiq Rahimi

Jean-Claude Carrière, one of the most important screenwriters in the history of cinema, co-writes the adaptation of the Goncourt Prize-winning novel, written by Atiq Rahimi. In a biting and vivid script, Actress Golshifteh Farahani plays a distraught woman in a war zone, tending to her wounded husbandwho is in a vegetative state after being shot in the neck.

In life, when he enjoyed all his faculties, he was a cruel and tyrannical husband. Now, she feels that, despite the overwhelming burden of caring for him, she enjoys a kind of freedom to speak her mind to her half-living, half-corpse husband.

The woman, young and with two daughters, alternates the time she spends at home, avoiding the guerrillas who continue fighting in the street, with the time she spends with her aunt, a woman freed from all religious and patriarchal yoke who stays in charge of the girls.

After many hours alone with her husband, She begins to tell him her confidences, treating him as if he were her stone of patience. According to this Arabic legend, a person can be freed from all his sorrows if he speaks out loud to a stone. Now her husband plays the role of that stone.

Through her story we discover the life of a Muslim woman, their passions, their frustrations, their desires and, above all, their fight against male oppression. A sensual, suggestive film that invites you to dream in a devastated scenario.

5. The Club, by Pablo Larraín

Within films with a shocking plot, pedophilia always appears as one of the topics that touches the most sensitivities both on screen and in real life. The club addresses this topic from a unique perspective, telling the story of a hidden pedophile club in a coastal town in Chile.

The film’s director, Pablo Larraín, is a Chilean director who has created complex and disturbing films about a country emerging from denial about the Pinochet dictatorship. However, the truth is that in the innermost layers of society there continues to be resentment and fear, and his films show this type of pain.

The film returns to this idea of ​​guilt and denial, which always seem to go back to the country’s politics and history. There is a claustrophobic intensity to the drama, with a nightmare flavor.

Violence in the same cinematographic story

Child abuse could be a metaphor for political tyranny. Even stranger, the priests and their nun-jailer figure have taken up a hobby: they are training a greyhound and preparing it for lucrative local races. It’s as if all their repressed sensuality, sin, and self-hatred have been channeled into this new vice of dog racing.

Marcelo Alonso plays Father García, the church’s special investigator, to uncover what has been happening. However, the priests turn out to be good at preventing it, and the more time he spends there, the greater the unspoken argument becomes for tempering justice with mercy. Therefore, a new martyr like Jesus Christ is chosen to do penance, so that The club be forgotten by the institutions, as happened with the Pinochet dictatorship.

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