More cinema of despair this Bleak Week

In partnership with the American Cinematheque and Prince Charles Cinema, we're bringing Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair to Hyde Park Picture House for the first time from Fri 19 Jun - Thu 25 Jun. But we're conscious that the exploration of films depicting the darkest sides of humanity and the bleakest points in history shouldn't stop there. So we asked our team which films they'd recommend for those looking for an even darker June. Here's what they said...

The Turin Horse (2012)

"Oddly, but somehow satisfyingly, The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr’s final film, was the first of his I watched and its impact on me was profound, as I expect his films are on anyone who’s seen them. But lucky me! to hit on what is, I think, the very pinnacle of his many cinematic achievements, an awe-inspiring, dread-inducing final statement, but one centred around a precise theatricality, containing so much humanity. It is not, however, necessarily a part of humanity that we’d readily acknowledge in ourselves. But if you know, you know. In The Turin Horse, Tarr and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky have distilled its characters (us) into a relentless, ever-circling cycle of existence and burden, their bleak lives immersive and to be endured, in the same way we experience Tarr’s films and which, if we’re honest with ourselves, mirror our own. What’s not to like?"

- Robb Barham, Operations & Programme Manager

The Turin Horse is showing at HPPH on Mon 22 Jun as part of Bleak Week. You can find out more & book tickets here.

Beanpole (2019)

"Kantemir Bagalov's post-war Leningrad tale of two women locked in a quiet power struggle has stayed with me since 2019 - I can't seem to stop coming back to it when I think about how to keep living after experiencing something horrible.

Beanpole is brutal and tender in equal measure, just like the bond between Iya and Masha. Their dynamic ripples between cruelty, desperation, care, and a very strange kind of love. The lived-in reds and greens of the colour palette bloom in desolate Leningrad; the colours are warm because this is a story about life after an overwhelming amount of death, and the acts of desperation one will commit for a life worth living."

- Vee Boyden, Cinema Venue Coordinator

Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)

"As Bleak Week comes around, my mind races full of 'feel-bad' filmmakers - from Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, and even Thomas Vinterberg all the way across the pond to the likes of Harmony Korine. Starring a magnetic Ewen Bremner, iconic Chloë Sevigny and Werner Herzog as their maniacal but memorable father (none of whom are strangers to dark films), Julien Donkey-Boy is a cornerstone of the 'bleak' genre. Made as part of the stripped-back Dogme 95 movement, the film's lo-fi production and grubby textures bring you into the grit and grime of its world. As we follow our freewheeling protagonist on their tragic journey, it feels like the movie's crunchy digital distortion mirrors the crackling sense of anxiety that buzzes beneath Korine's storytelling. Both hypnotic and hellish."

- Ben Fletcher, LHT's Website and Communications Officer

Threads (1984)

"The bleakness of this film is its focus on ordinary people facing an inhuman event- the fallout of a nuclear catastrophe. 

An eerily realistic concept for us now in 2026 as it was for the genuinely horrified audiences in 1984, and 1985 respectively. The date of its original broadcast was hailed as ‘the night the world didn’t sleep’.

Saying I love this film, couldn’t be further from the truth! But you are here for bleakness and trauma, so obviously I encourage everyone to see it at Hyde Park Picture House (I regularly have flashbacks of this film).

Set in 1980s Sheffield, much like the present-day Northern city, the majority of the population have limited capacity to worry about the threat of nuclear war.

But to no viewer's surprise, the inevitable happens... What follows are the days, weeks, months and years of the horrific fallout. It’s a hard and sometimes gruesome watch - but that’s the point!

Merging fact and fiction, director Mick Jackson and writer Barry Hines researched the scientific and medical truths of the effects of a nuclear event.

Juxtapose this with fictional lives of young and old living in South Yorkshire, and what you get is a terrifying, and scarily realistic representation of how you, me and everything we know and love can be destroyed in an instant."

- Alice Duggan, Cinema Venue Coordinator.

Threads is showing at HPPH on Fri 19 Jun as part of Bleak Week. You can find out more & book tickets here.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

"A few titles come to mind for Bleak Week; honourable mentions to Requiem for a Dream and Mysterious Skin. But I recently put myself through rewatching All of Us Strangers and was reminded of the depths of its bleakness. Depicting a happenstance love affair between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) as they grapple with identity and trauma, the film vibrates on a level of abject discomfort - from its strange visual tone, at once saturated and dim, to the way it thematically entangles intimacy, loneliness and grief. It creates this looming feeling that there might be a tragedy waiting in the wings, as if everything on screen might collapse. Its ending might seem to provide catharsis - a release of that tension - but, to me (and possibly to the other patrons sobbing around me at HPPH when I first saw the film in 2024), it leaves you with a horrible, unresolved feeling. What do we provide to those around us? What would change if we were not there? Does anything we do, anything we believe in, actually matter? Or, are we trapped in the shadows of our circumstance? Those are questions the movie, ultimately, refuses to answer. For anyone thinking about watching this in the hopes of finding a cute gay love story, I implore you to look elsewhere. But for anyone who wants to wrap themselves in a blanket, weep, and break their own heart, All of Us Strangers is an unforgiving 105-minutes and an all-round terrible time."

- Aaron Cawood, LHT's Social Media & Content Officer

The Road (2009)

"Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name cracked my heart open then left it lying broken on the floor. To use such a beautiful narrative structure to describe the most unbelievably ugly of surroundings, whilst also framing everything around the most sincere love between a parent and a child…it’s just an incredible thing.

I love John Hillcoat’s 2009 film for trying to adapt that for the screen. It can feel like an impossible and thankless task to try to reimagine much-loved stories. But, The Road is ultimately a story about love, and hope - and we need these things in an endless supply."

- Wendy Cook, Head of Cinema

The Road is showing at HPPH on Tue 23 Jun as part of Bleak Week with a philosophy talk hosted by Professor Joe Saunders. You can find out more & book tickets here.

Blonde (2022)

"Andrew Dominik worked over a decade to bring his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ to the screen, only for it to be wildly condemned by critics. It won worst film of the year at the Razzies, which showed their organisation as the joke that they are. Hardly anybody engaged seriously with this Lynchian horror film about the perils of fame, the third in an unofficial trilogy Dominik has made on the subject. It’s a brutal film that holds up a mirror up to the abuse that pervaded Hollywood and only an outsider (Dominik is an Australian) would dare expose. It dismantles the myth of Marilyn Monroe and, in a terrifying sequence, also the myth of America’s other great white “martyr,” JFK. It’s not for everyone, but if you like David Lynch, please give this a chance. It’s one of the very few films that deserves the label of “Lynchian”.

- Ian Schultz, Volunteer

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

"Even though I adore hopeful films like Harvey and Paddington, it turns out I’m a sucker for utterly devastating portrayals of siblings fending for themselves because Grave of the Fireflies and Nobody Knows both completely have my broken heart. Studio Ghibli animations are always visually spectacular, and Grave of the Fireflies is no exception – the fireflies especially. However, most Ghibli films are a fantastical escape, whereas this one deals with the gruesome impact of war, so the contrast of its beauty and the horrors it depicts hits even harder. It’s the perfect expression of how precious our world and its people are, and how endless the reasons not to decimate such beauty with war are.

The story is based on Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical novel in which a teenager and his sister struggle to survive during World War II Japan, after the death of their mother. While we’re used to animations often being cheerier, with a story this bleak, particularly one that focuses on children, perhaps animation is the most ethical choice rather than recruiting children to enact such harrowing experiences. I think this film should be required watching, especially for world leaders, because I don’t see how anyone could think war is a good idea after seeing its devastating effects on innocent lives like the adorable brother and sister in Grave of the Fireflies. Even thinking and writing about this film moves me to tears, but it’s worth the tears – watch it if you haven’t already."

- Martha Boyd, Digital Marketing Coordinator

Grave of the Fireflies is showing at HPPH on Wed 24 & Thu 25 Jun as part of Bleak Week. You can find out more & book tickets here.

And if that's not enough bleak film recommendations for you, you can read this Bleak Week newspaper, which includes programmer reviews from cinemas across the world who are taking part in Bleak Week and highlighting the films they're most proud to be screening: