The folks out at Anchor Bay sent us a copy of Beautiful Boy for us to review, and this one, you won’t be able to get hands on until tomorrow. But rest assured, for those of you who like a good drama but don’t particularly care if it makes you feel bad the entire time you watch it, well, you’ll do pretty nicely here indeed.

Beautiful Boy follows a married couple who’s been pretty much estranged for years, except for the child they had together. But when said child embarks on a mass shooting at the college he attends before killing himself, the couple suddenly finds themselves thrust together much more than they had been in recent years, and though no one’s sure just how it will all turn out, it’s going to be a long, strange trip the two had never wanted to take, though the trip may well leave them much better off than they expected.

The end result of the whole thing is, frankly, a massive downer, especially in the early going. The family is clearly fragmenting, the kid’s clearly buckling, and then, oh, by the way, junior ran amok with a gun and left a pile of corpses in his wake, this is not the kind of movie you want to watch if you’re having a bad day and you want to cheer up. This is actually the kind of movie you probably want to watch if you’ve been thinking, jeepers, I’ve been entirely too happy lately and it’s about time I was just miserable for an hour and forty minutes.

In fact, the whole thing actually manages to get worse following the announcement as the estranged couple is now living down the death of their son and are largely unable to comfort each other because they barely know who they are any more. Mom spends half her time on her son’s bed while Dad’s off sobbing in the shower before work. Long stretches will go by in silence, making the whole thing even more gut-wrenching than the subject matter would imply. Then we discover that Junior’s got a manifesto, and things get even more depressing from there, up to where husband and wife are passing around press statements and not saying anything.

By the time I got done watching Beautiful Boy I wanted to call my own parents and apologize. I wasn’t sure for what, exactly, but all I knew was I felt like apologizing. This was easily one of the most depressing movies I’d seen in months, possibly ever, and frankly, I regret watching it. It’s not that it was a bad movie, or a particularly poorly-done movie, it’s just that the content was so plainly, oppressively depressing that watching it was an ordeal better reserved for circles of Hell itself.

If you want to feel bad watching a movie, then Beautiful Boy was made just for you. It’s a very well put together film, it’s just such a disaster to watch that it’s hard to recommend. Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale splits the difference and gives Beautiful Boy, a very well put together device that will gouge out your soul while you watch it, a six out of ten because, as good as it is, it’s still a lot like the Breakfast Machine from Family Guy. It doesn’t make breakfast at all…it just shoots you in the arm. And that’s what watching Beautiful Boy is like, a giant, impressive piece of work that just shoots you in the arm.