21 of the Saddest Scenes Where Nobody Dies
When was the last time a movie made you cry? Mufasa’s death? Snape’s death? The death of the shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Are you sensing a pattern here? The easiest way to wring some cheap tears out of an audience is to murder a beloved character, but that’s the coward’s way out. The real masters know how to leave you staring into the abyss without anyone, even a magical Nazi, needing to die.
Redditor Ok-Impress-2222 gets this. “When talking about sad scenes in movies, the majority of what gets mentioned are scenes of a character’s death, understandably,” they recently told r/Movies. “But that exact notion makes it all the more interesting to try and name a sad scene that isn’t a death scene.” They named “the last scene of Pursuit of Happyness” and “Jessie’s backstory from Toy Story 2” as their “personal favorites” and then asked, “What’s the saddest non-death scene in a movie?”
Fair warning: A good percentage of them involve Haley Joel Osment.
The Sixth Sense
Little Miss Sunshine
Stand By Me
Hope Floats
Les Miserables
Still Alice
Schindler’s List
Flight
Dumbo
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
The Fox and the Hound
Coco
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Good Will Hunting
Friday Night Lights
Saving Private Ryan
The Royal Tenenbaums
La La Land
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Forrest Gump
Cast Away
