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Top 10 Harrowing Moments Suggested by: Kelly Hsiao Surprisingly difficult request from Ms. Hsiao. Personally, I don't find a great deal of moments truly harrowing but I could easily name fifty scenes which greatly affect others. Apparently, Ms. Hsiao was not happy with this, she wanted some sort of in-depth personal journey. She didn't care what affected any random cinema-goer (Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma comes to mind... which I regrettably own on Blu-Ray), she wanted to know which particular moments cut in to a film critic who has seen pretty much everything. Here goes - suffice to say there are a few spoilers here-and-there. 10. Akira [1988] Directed By: Katsuhiro Otomo I was a rather young teen when I first saw Akira and to this day it still remains one of my favourite films of all time. I can't really put a finger on a particular scene, just the feeling the film left me with. I wasn't aware of a great deal of manga or anime until then and the concept of the dystopian cyber punks was wholly alien to me. But I don't think I will ever forget the staggering sense of paranoid fear that the world would end up a crippled mess, like Neo-Tokyo. 9. Platoon [1986] Directed By: Oliver Stone Atrocities committed during war have always been conveniently omitted from film and it's always the 'bad guys' who are responsible. I've always credited Platoon with a shocking amount of realism and no more so then when our lead, Private Chris Taylor falls prey to the madness and taunts a disabled Vietnamese villager before another soldier, Bunny, brutally beats him to death in front of his mother. 8. The Wind That Shakes The Barley [2006] Directed By: Ken Loach A very personal one here. As most are aware, I'm half English, half Irish and as such have a great deal of internal conflict over the troubles. Even within my family there was a split divide over pro and anti-treaty. Midway through this film, Damien is forced to shoot one of his own for betraying the group and leading to his brother Teddy suffering under torture. The pre-execution dialogue is so well written that the whole thing left me just a little tender. 7. Requiem For A Dream [2000] Directed By: Darren Aronofsky Desperate and addicted to drugs, our leads embark on a terrifying montage of lows: Sara gets shock-therapy, Harry loses his arm and Marion is forced to have sex with a woman she's never met in a room full of old business men. The whole thing put me off any form of drug completely. 6. Passion Of The Christ [2004] Directed By: Mel Gibson Yeah, this is a torture-rife movie but the only point at which I came close to feeling wheezy was the nailing of the hands to the cross. I genuinely can't explain why but it was just a lot to endure. 5. Bambi [1942] Directed By: David Hand Bambi's mum getting shot... that's all I want to say about that. 4. American History X [1998] Directed By: Tony Kaye The 'bite the curb' scene is indeed horrific but the closing tension building up to the final execution is just unbearable to a degree that when it all unfolds you are left so shocked by the griminess of it all. 3. Edward Scissorhands [1990] Directed By: Tim Burton I know this is going to get a lot of flak for being on this list but it hit me very hard. I was maybe seven or eight years old and I watched the creepy looking Eddie stuck up in that building all by himself, unable to see the woman he wanted to be with and the sense of injustice and outright disservice done to the lead character brought me to tears - and to date this is one of the only films to do so. 2. Schindler's List [1993] Directed By: Steven Spielberg Any holocaust release is going to play with your heart strings but Spielberg's adaptation was so beautifully done that you couldn't help but become completely drawn in. If I had to choose a particularly upsetting scene, it wouldn't actually be the shower scene but Schindler seeing the body of the girl in the red coat slumped with a pile of corpses on a cart. 1. Irreversible [2002] Directed By: Gaspar Noe Simply put, one of the most traumatising scenes in cinema history is featured slap-bang in the middle of this harrowing piece. The only two pieces of trivia I will offer to explain my verdict are the following: the only direction given to the actors, other than the start and finish was that the rape did not run for over twenty minutes (the final running time was an excruciating 6 minutes) and secondly, for the first thirty minutes a background noise at the almost inaudible frequency of 28Hz was broadcast to instil nausea, vertigo and gastric disturbances. I've mentioned it time-and-again in my reviews but this film just messes with me far too much.