There are a lot of issues that modern movie audiences come into contact with in their daily lives that are often shied away from in movie-making, and for understandable reasons. Anyone whose life has been touched in any way by suicide can probably tell you a lot more about it than your average movie, as in films it’s like a subject to be glossed over as quickly as possible. It’s hard to talk about, it’s hard to think about, people don’t agree about it, and it’s easy to get wrong, even when artists are well-intentioned.
But we’ve made up a list of ten films that took the time and care to approach the subject sensitively, and really give an honest look at a tragedy that society must constantly reckon with, showing not only how it relates to the victim, but how it affects those left behind.
10 Love Liza (2002)
There’s now an extra layer of poignancy to this 2002 tragicomedy, in that we have now also tragically lost its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Although the role of Wilson wasn’t written specifically for Hoffman, the screenplay was written by his older brother Gordy. Wilson is a man who has been left destroyed by the unexpected suicide of his wife Liza, and although he has what he believes is her suicide note in a sealed letter to him, he’s too distraught to open it, despite the urgings of his mother-in-law, an excellent Kathy Bates. To fill the hole that Liza left in his life, Wilson, at the suggestion of a co-worker, becomes involved in building and flying remote-controlled planes, which he had hoped would cover up his growing addiction to gasoline huffing, although it doesn’t do the trick.
Hoffman turns in a beautiful performance of a man plunged into depression, having been incapable of understanding what his wife was going through that led her to her final choice. Although he finally brings himself to read the letter, it doesn’t really contain an explanation, which is something that can make those left behind by suicide feel such a specific, incomparable type of grief.
Related: Best Philip Seymour Hoffman Movies, Ranked
9 Ordinary People (1980)
Robert Redford made his stunning directorial debut in 1980 with an adaptation of Judith Guest’s 1978 novel. Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton are the Jarretts, Calvin, Beth, and Conrad, a family left reeling after their older son, Buck, dies in a sailing accident. The surviving son, Conrad, has only recently returned home after hospitalization for a suicide attempt, having been inadvertently a party to Buck’s accident.
Calvin is the one trying hardest to hold the family together, while Beth seems to resent her surviving son, making it plain that she preferred Buck. Like many families when confronted with suicide, this one is as ripped apart by Conrad’s attempt as they are by Buck’s death, and they do not survive intact. Timothy Hutton won an Academy Award for his performance as the tortured Conrad, and critic Victor Canby summarized the film’s success astutely, calling it, “a moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them.”
Related: Every Movie Directed by Robert Redford, Ranked
8 I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977)
Kathleen Quinlan received acclaim for her 1977 role as Deborah, a young woman, possibly schizophrenic, in a mental institution following a suicide attempt. A privileged upbringing and a pretty face are no protection as she struggles to exist in reality rather than the fantasy world that she consistently escapes to. The institution threatens her sanity even further (and you’ll spot a few recognizable faces, like Dennis Quaid and Jeff Conaway), and it’s only through the efforts of a compassionate doctor (played by Bergman muse Bibi Andersson) that Deborah is able to come through to the other side of things and see hope for her life.
7 Harold and Maude (1971)
The 1971 black comedy is perhaps more talked about as a curious May-December romance than a film about suicide, but it’s eloquent on the subject of both. Teenage Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) is obsessed with all things morbid, and while attending a stranger’s funeral (a hobby of his), he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), a quirky, law-breaking elderly woman who teaches Harold how to live life rather than obsess over death.
The two begin a romance, much to the chagrin of those around them. Maude doesn’t tell Harold that she has long-planned her own suicide to coincide with her 80th birthday, and he tries to save her, but in a way her death saves him, and we see Harold at the film’s end in colorful clothing for the first time, hopefully on his way to living the sort of life that Maude wanted for him.
6 Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Based on Susanna Kaysen’s seminal 1993 memoir, James Mangold’s 1999 adaptation stars Winona Ryder as the suicidal Susanna during her time on a psychiatric ward. She’s surrounded by patients worse off than herself, schizophrenics and bulimics and self-harmers, liars and sociopaths. Angelina Jolie, Clea Duvall, and Elisabeth Moss all give standout performances as fellow inmates, but it is Brittany Murphy as Daisy who is perhaps the most affecting, as a self-harming young woman grievously abused by her father.
Daisy has recovered to the point of being released from the hospital, but living with her father again isn’t much of an option, and Jolie’s vicious sociopath Lisa’s final bullying proves too much for her. Susanna comes to the realization that she doesn’t want to end up like Daisy or Lisa, and commits herself more fully to her recovery.
5 The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Sofia Coppola’s dreamy 1999 film adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ much-loved 1993 novel moves along some of the same lines as Love Liza (see above), with more of a focus on those left behind than on the victims of suicide. It’s the 1970s and the five teenage Lisbon sisters are like princesses from a European fairy tale: beautiful, gracious, enigmatic, forever just out of reach to the boys desperate to get to know them better. The baby of the family, Cecelia, makes a suicide attempt that isn’t exactly taken seriously, and her second attempt is successful, devastating the family who proceed to hold themselves even further apart from their community.
Inroads are made by one local boy, Trip (Josh Hartnett), who begins a relationship with the oldest daughter, Lux (Kirsten Dunst), but a homecoming dance where Trip secures dates for all of the sisters becomes a turning point there’s no coming back from. The girls have made a suicide pact, and the Lisbon parents, finding themselves with the unimaginable tragedy of losing all five of their children, leave the neighborhood, leaving the boys who loved their daughters to grieve alone, never really sure as to how it all happened, or if they could have stopped it.
4 The Hours (2002)
Virginia Woolf as played by Nicole Kidman is only in one-third of this sectioned film, but her presence (and the influence of her novel Mrs. Dalloway) looms large throughout the whole movie. In 1923, Woolf is struggling through a bout of depression to write the book that many consider being her masterpiece, detailing one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway.
In 1951, Laura (Julianne Moore) is a mother with what looks like a picture-perfect life, but underneath she is dissatisfied and stifled, and is about to attempt suicide when an encounter with Mrs. Dalloway makes her change her mind. And in 2001, Clarissa (Meryl Streep) and her AIDS-stricken friend Richard discuss the relevance of Woolf in their lives. It is Richard who ends up taking his own life, and his mother, revealed to be Laura, who chose to instead abandon her family. The amazing thing is the way that these women’s lives are tied together by Woolf’s, a life that was so fraught with unhappiness but still gave strength and beauty to others.
3 Taste of Cherry (1997)
The minimalist long takes of Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film contribute to the isolation of the main character, Mr. Badii, a middle-aged man on a mission driving his car through Tehran, hoping to find someone who will bury him once he has killed himself. Unsurprisingly, the first few people he asks decline, especially as Badii is unwilling to explain why he feels the need to kill himself in the first place. The taxidermist who eventually agrees first tries to talk him out of it, telling Badii of his own brush with suicide and what changed his mind.
Badii lies in his pre-dug grave that night during a thunderstorm, but Kiarostami breaks the fourth wall and intervenes before we find out if Badii goes through with his plan, or if the taxidermist shows up. It’s a much more existential approach to the question of suicide, although some of the randomness and happenstance, the way one’s mind can change unexpectedly, add a haunting sense of mystery.
2 Christine (2016)
The tragic story of Christine Chubbuck was the inspiration for not one but two films released in 2016, the other being a documentary entitled Kate Plays Christine. Chubbuck was a lonely news reporter in Sarasota, Florida, frustrated at work and in her dating life as she approached 30. Her family knew of her mental health struggles, but it was a complete surprise to her colleagues when she shot herself in the head during a live broadcast in 1974.
Rebecca Hall plays Chubbuck with sensitivity, a woman in great pain who has no outlet for expression. She’d been told recently by a doctor she would likely have trouble conceiving a child, and her feelings of misery are compounded when she discovers that the co-worker she’s interested in, played by Michael C. Hall, is already seeing someone else. It was a devastating, private thing that Chubbuck was going through, that she chose to make very public, and it’s maybe only a decision that someone else struggling with that choice could truly understand.
1 The Slender Thread (1965)
Sydney Pollack teamed up with Sidney Poitier in Pollack’s directorial debut in 1965, which was ahead of its time in tackling the subject of suicide. Poitier is Alan, a student just coming in for a clinic night shift answering phones for a suicide hotline, when he receives a call from a woman named Inga (Anne Bancroft). Inga confesses that she has taken a large number of pills, and she wants to talk.
Alan must keep her talking about the events that have led up to her actions, all while trying to surreptitiously track down her location. Alan and his colleagues manage to find and save Inga by the film’s end, in a timely reminder that suicide is a community problem, and the more that people can be there for each other, the better chance they have.
