The Darkest Movies You'll Find On Netflix

Netflix's catalog of movies is one of the best among the streaming services vying for your hard-earned dollars. With thousands of movies to keep you entertained at any hour of the day, even if they've lost a few titles to new competition in the last few years, it's still the go-to streaming service for the discerning, sitting-on-the-sofa moviegoer. And among all the comedies and dramas and action flicks, if you're in the mood for a good scare, you'll find a decent showing of some of the weirdest, disturbingly dark films ever produced.

There are titles on Netflix you're not going to find anywhere else thanks to their amped-up original productions, and a great mix of older movies you may have missed the first time around or forgotten about completely. So what are the darkest movies you'll find on Netflix that are actually still good? Let's get started.

When "Veronica" premiered on Netflix, it was widely touted as being a film so scary people couldn't even finish watching it. In addition, it had the pedigree of being based on a "true" story, something horror producers have made the most of since the days of "The Amityville Horror" and later "The Blair Witch Project" to add that extra dimension to the marketing.

Truth is, "Veronica," a Spanish flick directed by Paco Plaza, is a tense little tale that quickly impressed critics and currently sits at 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (which means 88 percent of critics recommended seeing it). Few horror movies even cross into positive territory in the eyes of most critics, so clearly there's something there.

For a movie with this much hype, it's actually a surprisingly good film with some great performances by very young actors. The movie follows a teenage girl and her two younger siblings, relying on them to carry the drama with very little adult support, and they do a great job. It's at times intense and creepy, and definitely features that edge-of-your-seat build-up to dread you want in a horror movie.

If you've ever found yourself feeling anxious in social situations, then "The Invitation" just might be the film for you. With its setup of a simple dinner party invite that slowly degrades into something much more sinister, this is the perfect dark and twisted tale for everyone who'd rather stay home than deal with other people.

This critically acclaimed movie pushes the envelope on tension straight from the start, in which everything is just slightly off enough to give you that ominous sense of dread about what's yet to come. You know something's wrong, you're just not sure what it is yet. Then it continues until the payoff, which is just unbridled madness with a twist or two along the way. As ScreenCrush points out, the fun in the movie is found in the "increasingly bizarre and uncomfortable evening." A real claustrophobic vibe settles over the whole movie, mostly set in a single home from which escape isn't entirely an option. And hey, there's a creepy cult thing going on, too, so bonus.

Another critical favorite –- holding strong at 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes – "Creep" is a master class in making you feel uncomfortable thanks in no small part to the unhinged performance of actor/writer Mark Duplass, which Variety claimed was the strongest aspect of the whole film. The title of this movie isn't a metaphor or a random word pulled from a hat; it's completely on the money describing the film's antagonist.

While a lot of movies in the horror genre rely solely on trying to manipulate fear through terrifying imagery, "Creep" builds up its character with awkward, cringe-inducing weirdness. You feel uncomfortable watching this guy, and it just gets worse as the film progresses. You know the other shoe is going to drop, you know you're watching a horror movie and have to expect the worst, but the journey there is what sets "Creep" apart. This is the kind of guy you fear ever meeting in real life because, unlike a Jason or a Leatherface, this guy seems real.

The film makes use of the found-footage trope effectively, and thanks to the performance by Mark Duplass as the titular creep, there's enough awkward humor to keep the film from getting bogged down in too much cringe.

A Netflix original, based on a book by Stephen King and directed by Mike Flanagan — who brought us "Oculus" and "Hush" – "Gerald's Game" is an exercise in tension and total discomfort. Alongside "It," "Gerald's Game" made 2017 a banner year for Stephen King adaptations, which have a pretty rocky history in terms of quality. 

"Gerald's Game" jumps into an awkward, uncomfortable scenario almost from the beginning, ramps into overdrive, and stays there for the rest of the film. King's book seemed like the sort of thing that would nearly be impossible to film given the nature of the story, but Flanagan gives it hell right out of the gates, and, with some clever storytelling techniques, puts you right alongside star Carla Gugino for a psychological kick to the head, complete with one of the most hard-to-watch scenes ever filmed — you'll know it when you see it.

The Verge called "Gerald's Game" one of Stephen King's worst books, but acknowledged it became one of his best movies at the same time, and critics quite enjoyed the movie, too.

Folk horror is a subgenre that deals with the modern, civilized world clashing with its dark, pagan past. 2017's "The Ritual" is a formidable new entry into that particular subgenre, dealing with four friends who embark on a trip dreamed of by the fifth member of their squad, who had been killed in a robbery the previous year. This trip takes the four British men deep into the woods of a Swedish national park, where they face harrowing visions and inexplicable effigies, while one friend must confront the guilt he feels over his failure to prevent his murdered friend's death. 

It's best to go into this movie fresh, but if you need further selling, "The Ritual" has easily the dopest creature design of the last decade of horror films, as the quartet's journeys lead them to a village that worships an ancient evil. It's a look that will really stick with you (and your dreams). As of 2024, "The Ritual" is rocking a respectable 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Director Gareth Evans rose to cult fame thanks to his absolute slobberknocker of an entry into the field of martial arts films, 2011's "The Raid," as well as its follow-up, 2014's "The Raid 2." However, he caught the eye of horror fans with "Safe Haven," his entry for 2013's "V/H/S/2," which many fans have hailed as the best segment in the entire three-film anthology series. 2018 saw Evans return to both horror and religious cults in the Netflix original film "Apostle," though in this one he moves away from his familiar Indonesian settings in favor of a utopian cult based on a Welsh island.

Set in 1905, this movie features Dan Stevens as a former missionary who is sent to infiltrate a mysterious cult that has kidnapped his sister, presumably with dark designs on her life. The further he digs into the truth of the cult, while trying to keep from himself being discovered, the darker, bloodier, and more eye-opening events become.

"Apostle" is a solid new example of folk horror, currently holding at 78 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (as of 2024), with the consensus that it "resists easy scares in favor of a steady, slow-building descent into dread led by a commanding central performance from Dan Stevens."

From the creators of the original "Saw" (you know, the best one), James Wan and Leigh Whannell, comes "Insidious," a ghost story about the dangers of oversleeping. "Insidious" was actually made as a response to "Saw": The creators wanted to prove they could make a scary movie without gore and, well, they succeeded. This movie is scary as all get-out, but only rated PG-13.

In the film, the Lambert family moves into a new house, and one of their children, Dalton, has a ghostly encounter in the attic that puts him into a coma. After Dalton returns home from the hospital, the family notices that odd, spooky things happen around him. It gets so bad that they abandon their new house and literally move somewhere else, the thing that everyone says they'd do if they were in a horror movie. At the new house, though, the supernatural events don't stop, and they soon discover that their son's coma may actually be the cause of the hauntings. 

"Insidious" spawned a whole franchise, with two prequels and a sequel, but they're of mixed quality. If you can watch any of them, watch the first one, as it's definitely the best (and scariest), scoring a 67-percent-fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes.

2023's "Society of the Snow" isn't the first to depict the Uruguayan plane crash that left a rugby team marooned in a remote spot in the Andes Mountains. The most famous is probably 1993's "Alive," a fairly commercial endeavor starring Ethan Hawke. "Society of the Snow," on the other hand, is a Spanish project directed and co-written by J. A. Bayona, starring a mostly Uruguayan and Argentine cast of young newcomers, filmed on location in South America. That, combined with a script that hews closer to the truth, creates a verisimilitude that makes the viewer much more keenly aware of what the survivors of Flight 571 endured. 

Bayona doesn't rely on dramatic flourishes to convey unease. It dawns on the passengers in real time that they're going to slam into the mountain. The moment of impact isn't slowed down for effect. Metal buckles and legs break almost faster than the eye can process it all. And as the men and women who don't die instantly come to terms with what it will take to persist, physically and ethically (notoriously, they resorted to cannibalizing the dead), Bayona lets the contrast between the natural beauty of the snowy peaks and the impossible anguish of their situation speak for itself. A scene in which the emaciated teammates realize their urine has turned black is a completely new kind of horror to behold on screen.

Audiences around the world are used to seeing Chris Hemsworth as Thor. But in 2022, he set down his magic hammer to play an entirely different type of character: the chilling antagonist in "Spiderhead." Here, Hemsworth is Steve Abnesti, the handsome, charismatic, well-dressed, and seemingly affluent facilitator of an experimental pharmaceutical program. Convicted prisoners, in lieu of serving a traditional sentence, can opt to participate in a trial in which a device called a Mobipack is implanted into their bodies. Various in-development drugs can be pumped into that device which, theoretically, will alter the test subject's mood for the better. But those test subjects (including Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett, among others) are still kept captive at Spiderhead, the company's live-in laboratory on an isolated island. And as it turns out, Hemsworth's Abnesti doesn't exactly subscribe to the Hippocratic oath. 

Based on the work of short-story master George Saunders (who has a screenwriting credit) and directed by Joseph Kosinski (the man behind "Top Gun: Maverick"), "Spiderhead" starts out as mind-bending speculative fiction about our criminal justice and healthcare systems, before evolving into an increasingly creepy and bloody thriller that feels every bit as invasive as having a remote control paired to your brain. 

Steve Abnesti might not be a god, but he wants to be one more than Thor ever did: It's sinister just how much he gets a kick out of tampering with the doses of substances designed to induce overwhelmingly strong feelings of love, fear, and the urge to commit violence. 

Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland are two of the most popular heartthrobs of their generation, but their legions of fans shouldn't go into 2020's "The Devil All the Time" expecting to swoon. Instead, they'll likely be revolted by what transpires. This difficult-to-watch ensemble period piece, which also stars Bill Skarsgård, Sebastian Stan, Riley Keough, Eliza Scanlen, and Mia Wasikowska, takes on the topic of generational trauma and puts its many characters, as well as the audience, through the emotional ringer. 

The plot of "The Devil All the Time" is too complex and meandering to easily summarize. Thematically, the film delves deep into the brutality and paranoia inherent in everything from religion to war to relationships between men and women. There's a veteran who can't get over what he saw and did overseas, a delusional preacher who believes he has supernatural powers, another preacher who abuses the girls in his congregation, and corrupt and philandering politicians, not to mention a pair of serial killers with a distressingly specific kink. Family and fate bring these disparate, damaged personalities together and tear them apart. The result is as much pain and suffering as can fit in a movie. 

In fact, "The Devil All the Time" meets the criteria for just about every category of trigger warning. Viewers who are averse to combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder, extreme religiosity, sexual violence, pregnancy loss, suicide, and cruelty toward animals might be smart to avoid it. While the film was praised for its performances, it was dinged for being unnecessarily dark.

2022's "Don't Worry Darling" was director Olivia Wilde's follow-up to 2019's "Booksmart," and represented a major shift in tone and genre. The latter was a bawdy teen comedy, whereas the former was an oddball psychological mystery-slash-thriller with a message — but, unlike "Booksmart," wasn't especially well-reviewed. 

"Don't Worry Darling" is ultimately about the happiness, or lack thereof, within a traditional domestic partnership and the frustration professional women feel when opportunity, success, and appreciation seem to come so much more easily to their male counterparts. Whether "Don't Worry Darling," its premise, and its twist are actually good is one thing. Whether they're appropriately disturbing is another. 

Wilde does deftly handle the juxtaposition between the midcentury modern American utopia that serves as the movie's setting, and the slow-as-molasses sense of dread that protagonist Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) feels as inexplicable — and often troubling or downright scary — things start to happen. The film, which attempts to gaslight its audience along with Alice, contains some genuinely panic-inducing sequences that put "Don't Worry Darling" into the increasingly popular sub-genre of daylight horror. And that final reveal, implausible though it might be, is still the worst nightmare of every high-achieving woman with an insecure husband or boyfriend. 

Documentaries might not come to mind when streaming service surfers are on the hunt for something that's on the darker side, but skipping by them would be a huge mistake. Not only is Netflix well-known for its documentary offerings, the documentary format is often used to tell the most shocking ripped-from-the-headlines stories. One jaw-dropping example is 2022's "Our Father."

Via a combination of interviewers, archival footage, and dramatic recreation, "Our Father" brings to life the semi-recent news about an Indiana fertility doctor who inseminated his patients with his own sperm. The film lets the truth unfold piece of information by piece of information, as it did for the many families involved. Jacoba Ballard, who is positioned as the documentary's point-of-view character, knew her biological father was a donor (the audience eventually learns that wasn't the case for all of the victims) and used the company 23andMe to identify potential half-siblings. When more siblings showed up on her family tree than expected, as well as some of Dr. Donald Cline's own blood relatives, Ballard came to a distressing conclusion. 

Just how extensive Cline's reprehensible malpractice was isn't clear until the end of the movie. Mothers rightly feel violated by him. Fathers are destroyed to learn that, at least genetically speaking, their children aren't their own. Those children are angry about the health conditions they inherited. What's worse is that most of Cline's many, many offspring live within a radius of mere miles, meaning anyone — including sexual partners — could be a relative. If that sounds like the stuff of a horror movie, perhaps it won't be surprising that horror mogul Jason Blum produced "Our Father." 

Yorgos Lanthimos is brand unto himself. That brand's vibe? Intriguing yet discomfiting. The acclaimed Greek director of films like 2015's "The Lobster," 2018's "The Favourite," and 2023's "Poor Things" makes movies that are equally beautiful and grotesque, as well as equally mundane and surreal. Though 2009's "Dogtooth" gives it a run for its money, 2017's "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is Lanthimos' most warped magical reality to date. 

Colin Farrell is Steven Murphy, a heart surgeon with an enviable wife (Nicole Kidman) and an enviable life. He also has a low-key drinking problem and is carrying on a questionable friendship with a young man named Martin (Barry Keoghan), who recently lost his father. When Martin begins to cross some boundaries (he tries to ensnare Steven in an affair with his widowed mother, and he seduces Steven's teenage daughter), Steven tries to ghost him. Shortly thereafter, the surgeon's once-perfect (or at least perfect-seeming) family starts to suffer from an array of strange, debilitating maladies. Martin — who might possess mystical powers — confesses his real interest in the Murphys. Needless to say, his intentions aren't pure, and Lanthimos' modern-day myth, which is adapted from the ancient Greek play "Iphigenia in Aulis" by Euripides, hurdles toward tragedy. 

"The Killing of a Sacred Deer" includes visceral images of surgery being performed and violence being committed, but some of the most tense moments come just from the banal interactions between Farrell and Keoghan. Wicked Horror calls the latter's performance, "a supremely frightening yet weirdly charismatic creation who makes even the act of eating spaghetti seem terrifying."

2003's "Oldboy" is the kind of movie that goes to such dark places, it has a reputation that gets whispered about as if the very mention of its name is explicit. If you've seen this Korean action thriller by Park Chan-Wook (or if you happen to have been spoiled on its notorious twist), then you already know exactly what we mean. That twist, demented as it is, is just one of the elements that make "Oldboy" so sordid, and it exists for good reason. Another piece that takes loose inspiration from Greek literary history (this time, it's "Oedipus"), Park's film wasn't just made for shock value. Now widely considered a modern-day masterpiece, "Oldboy" has since become an inspiration to other filmmakers who've learned from and pay homage to it ... especially its famous one-shot hallway fight scene.

The plot machinations are just as inventive as the filmmaking techniques. Drunk dad Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) gets himself arrested and winds up in a mysterious hotel room prison where he learns, via the news, that his wife has been murdered and he's the police's main suspect. After 15 years of mind-numbing and body-wasting captivity, Dae-su is curiously set free. He thinks he's in control of his bloody revenge quest, but he's really a pawn in someone else's long game. 

"Oldboy" is loaded with stomach-churning images that nevertheless became iconic, including a hammer as a weapon and a live octopus as dinner. Spike Lee attempted an American remake in 2013, but — accomplished filmmaker though he is — he just couldn't reach the heights (or, more accurately, the despairing lows) of the original.

Many well-regarded war movies, harrowing though they are, make heroes out of their protagonists and heroism out of the act of going into battle. 2022's "All Quiet on the Western Front" is inspired by the seminal 1929 anti-war book of the same name ... a title that was banned and burned in 1930s Germany as Hitler rose to power. 

This time, it's the Germans adapting the source material as a cautionary tale for today's geopolitical climate. Edward Berger's version doesn't attempt to valorize anything about the conditions that get us into war, or the conditions on the ground once the fighting begins. The takeaway: the young people we send into combat are even more disposable than the standard-issued uniforms they wear.

In addition to its relentless Academy award-winning score, the film makes its bleak point with a framing device — a story within a story — that leaves the viewer feeling as utterly hopeless as soldiers in the trenches must've felt in the waning days of World War I. Inside that framing device is the story of Paul (Felix Kammerer), a not-quite-yet 18-year-old who, at first, gleefully signs up to fight and perhaps die for his country. The early scenes of boys enthusiastically shipping off as if they're about to play a championship football game are one kind of dark, and the battlefield violence that's worse than they ever could've imagined is another. But for all the flamethrowers igniting human bodies and tank treads crushing them, the hardest sequences to sit through are the ones that illustrate the pointlessness of war, like Paul's reluctant knife fight to the death, and the final charge that proceeds through surrender is already a foregone conclusion.

2022's "Incantation" makes good use of many of the tropes that have popped up in horror movies as of late. This Taiwanese flick is told, in part, through the lens of found footage, a la "The Blair Witch Project." It breaks the fourth wall and makes the viewer a character (and, more troublingly, a potential victim) like "The Ring." It also taps into folk traditions and what might be a cult the same way "Midsommar" does. But "Incantation" puts its own spin on these gimmicks and uses them to tell a wholly original story. 

The title comes from the fact that the narrator, Li Ronan (Hsuan-yen Tsai), coaxes the audience to learn and recite a chant that will come into play throughout the film. She needs us to do so to protect her daughter from a curse that befell her when she, her boyfriend, and a cousin trespassed into a sacred space during a religious ritual. That ritual involves human sacrifice, mysterious runes that appear upon the body, and an altar on which a veiled deity called Mother Buddha sits. 

The curse that was placed upon the trio takes effect immediately, and though Ronan initially survives it, the rest of "Incantation" becomes a mystery as to the true nature of that curse, as well as the true nature of the goddess in question and the cult that worships her. Complicating things is the fact that Ronan, who once gave her daughter up to foster care and was hospitalized for psychosis, might be an unreliable narrator. 

What's more horrifying than the failures of capitalism? According to a bevy of 21st-century speculative films, not much. In 2013, Netflix gave us Bong Joon-ho's "Snowpiercer," about a future in which survivors of a climate apocalypse live aboard a train in horizontally-arranged caste systems. For those who'd like to see a similar thought experiment implemented vertically, there's 2019's "The Platform," which is currently available on the streaming service. "The Platform" won that year's People's Choice Midnight Madness award at the Toronto International Film Festival ... a prize that recognizes the best in genre cinema that leans a little more hardcore. This Spanish production imagines a society in which resources literally trickle down from floor to floor. 

Somewhat like "Spiderhead," the people who find themselves living on "The Platform's" platforms are there to serve out various crimes or in exchange for various social benefits. Every month, inhabitants are randomly assigned a floor number between one and, well, the characters and the viewer alike can't quite be sure. Food starts at the top and descends to the bottom, though word is there's never enough left at the lower levels for the residents to survive. 

"The Platform" asks questions about just how bad things can get when necessities aren't evenly or fairly distributed. Its answer is, probably a lot worse than you'd think. There's cannibalism and animal cruelty here, too. Come for the clever concept and the social commentary, but be warned: you'll never look at panna cotta the same way again.     

In America, Jordan Peele has been praised for using the horror genre to explore the Black experience. 2020's "His House," written and directed by Remi Weekes, does the same for the black refugee experience. The film, which has a perfect 100 percent fresh critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, tells the story of a family who fled violent unrest in South Sudan for asylum in England. "His House" depicts the myriad everyday horrors that refugees live through (like deadly water crossings and pervasive casual racism) and adds a layer of supernatural horror for good measure.   

Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are accepted into a refugee program in London, where they're provided with a place to live, so long as they adhere to big brother-like rules. The couple disagrees about just how much they have to assimilate in order to be accepted by their new country and local community. It doesn't help that they're grieving the loss of their daughter, and their new house seems to be haunted by an entity called an apeth, who seems intent on tormenting them until some unspecified debt is paid. The apeth causes Bol to lose his grasp on reality, which threatens their refugee status. 

"His House" will have viewers on the edge of their seats throughout, but its final act — which pushes its characters to the very brink of their humanity — will knock them onto the floor. 

In 2023, the biggest movie of the year, "Barbie," taught us that it's really hard to be a woman. Audiences could also learn that lesson from 2018's "Level 16," about a boarding school in which girls are indoctrinated to be perfect. Perfect, at least in the opinion of those in charge, means healthy, compliant, unquestioning, and (crucially) blemish-free. While the PG-13-rated "Barbie" gets its message across through sharp jokes, "Level 16" uses dystopian horror to convey its thesis. Considering that skincare has become such a viral trend among young girls, that it plays such an integral part in this story might make "Level 16" extra disturbing to some viewers. 

The girls who have the misfortune of attending the school are motivated by a series of sticks and carrots. If they succeed in working their way through all 16 levels of their education, they'll graduate to a better life ... or so they're told. If they misbehave (and misbehavior can include helping a friend who dropped her lotion) they're torturously punished. There's also the fact that the outside air is poisonous to worry about, as well as the supplements they're fed and the drugs they're injected with. 

Obviously, there's a dark secret at the heart of the film, but the payoff is worth the investment as "Level 16" comes to interesting (though unfortunate) conclusions about what we value about girls.

Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended global civilization, causing systemic disruption and social distrust, "Leave the World Behind" disrupted the peace of Netflix viewers who clicked on its thumbnail, probably because of its star, Julia Roberts. This divisive movie by Sam Esmail, which also features the talents of Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, looks like a glossy thriller at first glance ... the kind that Hollywood doesn't really make anymore. Instead, what home audiences got was one of the hardest to categorize and most unresolved movies in recent memory, and one that perfectly simulated the existential terror we all felt back in 2020, both about the future and other people. 

Roberts and Hawke play a stressed-out married couple with two kids who book a vacation rental on impulse. After an enormous cargo ship runs aground on the serene nearby beach, a man in a tuxedo and his daughter show up at the front door, claiming to be the property's owners. Initially, the fact that the Wi-Fi isn't working seems like the smaller problem. 

Roberts' snarky Amanda is paranoid about the newcomers and hesitant to let them crash in what they say is their own basement until everybody figures out what's going on. Circumstances dictate that these six strangers have to weather what, it slowly becomes obvious, is a world-ending cataclysm. Along the way, truly bizarre things happen with everything from teeth to Teslas, and, to make the situation even more intense, Kevin Bacon shows up as a short-fused doomsday prepper. 

Some of the darkest movies out there dabble in body horror. As 2020's "Pieces of a Woman" demonstrates with devastating realism, there's no body horror more horrible than a pregnancy gone awry. This drama, starring an Oscar-nominated Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf as Martha and Sam, a couple expecting their first child, was lauded by critics for its prolonged and unflinching first act. 

Martha and Sam are disappointed when their midwife isn't able to attend their home birth. A replacement is sent instead, and over the course of about twenty long minutes, disappointment morphs into dread and finally into disbelief and despair. 

Childbirth is too often depicted cartoonishly in movies: A woman's water breaks, she's whisked into labor and delivery, and after a few Lamaze breaths, she's holding a prop baby in her arms. Even movies and TV shows that illustrate childbirth more accurately tend to cut away from the grisliest business, in terms of both the physical and emotional strain on the would-be mother. "Pieces of a Woman" forces the audience to sit with Martha as her worst fears go from outside chance to inevitable outcome. Though critics agreed the rest of the movie couldn't live up to its affecting opening scene, that plot point's impact on Martha and Sam's life renders the remaining story just as tragic. 

There's a fine line between comedy and horror: both can elicit a similarly surprised reaction from the audience when executed correctly, and hanging out on either side of that line are dark comedies and horror comedies. Take, for example, "Very Bad Things," in which a bachelor party accidentally kills a stripper and tries to cover it up, or "In Bruges" in which a bumbling hitman escapes to Belgium after accidentally shooting a kid. Or there's "I Care a Lot," an extremely dark comedy about the conservatorship of the elderly, which might sound like the least objectionable premise out of the three movies. The key difference is, the best man and the hitman didn't mean to do it and had remorse, whereas Rosamund Pike's con artist knows exactly what she's doing ... and does it with a sociopathic smile.

Pike plays Marla Grayson, a frighteningly put-together woman who exploits the broken, for-profit social welfare and healthcare systems by choosing rich marks and convincing the powers that be that they aren't well enough to live independently anymore. She becomes their legal guardian and robs these unsuspecting seniors of their autonomy, dignity, and (most of all) their fortunes, stashing them in group homes and taking over their assets. What makes "I Care a Lot" uniquely dark is that Marla is the film's antihero, not its villain, and the unexpected ending is befitting a comedy with a sense of humor that's so morbidly askew.