A lot of people watch The Office, or Real Housewives, or Survivor for comfort. Silly fun shows full of silly fun (insane) people doing silly fun things. I watch Spotlight.

What Spotlight lacks in fun and silliness it makes up for in earnest, hardboiled drama. It’s a film about righting wrongs and taking down the man, through the pen rather than the gun. Though there’s dark subject matter—if you’ve never seen Spotlight, it’s about the Boston Globe report that formed the first major expose of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church—it’s ultimately a hopeful film whose trajectory feels inevitable as we follow a team of dogged investigators who methodically pry away at the foundations of one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Performances are powerful across the board, from the quiet—an against-type Liev Schreiber as the antisocial yet straight-shooting new editor of the Globe—to the bombastic—Mark Ruffalo as a bulldog thinly disguised as a reporter, and Stanley Tucci as fast-talking courtroom David to the Church’s Goliath. Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, and a host of legitimate Boston accents pitch in to ground the film.

And, spoiler alert, they get ‘em. They get the Church. It’s great.

But Spotlight isn’t an exception on my comfort watch list. It’s representative, if anything. Maybe I’m screwed up some kind of way—but I don’t think so, necessarily. Because as dark as some of the subject matter in the following films is: they’re all hopeful stories. They may be nihilistic, cynical, even anarchic; yet there is a light at the end of each and every one of these dim tunnels, and at least one flawed, determined “hero” (really stretching that term for some of these protagonists) leading us toward it. It makes sense, to me, to find comfort in watching someone fight a tough fight against an unspeakable, yet human, evil, and find a way, through the pen or the court or, surprisingly rarely in these films, the gun, to bring it into the unsparing light of day.

The following are my favorite deep dark comfort films (and one limited series). Enjoy, and be comforted by the darkness.

Sicario (2015)

Sicario is a grim movie. Streaming apps frequently and bewilderingly categorize it as an “action-adventure,” and while there is gunfighting and there are a few explosions, it’s not exactly “adventurous.”

Instead Sicario is a matte landscape of the war on drugs. The longer you watch, the more unsettling the film becomes (and it begins pretty unsettling). Denis Villeneuve (of Dune) films the American southwest in constant overcast, with every action as grey as the sky above, continuously descending into black the farther along we go. Johan Johansson’s score, deep and haunting, redefines the music of tension.

None of that sounds even remotely comforting. However, the film is anchored by multiple stellar performances that pop against the dreary background. Emily Blunt leads as Kate Macer, a capable if frustrated FBI agent offered (what seems like) a chance to make a serious impact on the narco-economy. The mesmerizing, implacable Daniel Kaluuya is her stalwart, no-BS partner. Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro give a pair of career-best performances: Brolin as slime incarnate, the quintessential oily CIA operative, twelve steps ahead of everyone; del Toro as the enigmatic Alejandro, a “consultant” and “expert” in narco trafficking (emphasis on the “ “). Collectively they litter the film with moral and ethical conundrums; what does it take to make a “material difference” in the war on drugs? What is a “material difference?” Is that a war even worth fighting? How far is too far to act against a system that displays such casual disregard for a human life? Which system, specifically, are we talking about?

Sicario culminates in, I’ll say, a kind of relief. And in the end, it’s a pretty film with excellent scenery and great actors chewing it up. There’s a comfort in that, at least.

Michael Clayton (2007)

As the titular Michael Clayton in this Patterson-esque legal thriller, George Clooney embodies the disheveled underdog, a role he was not born to play but does to surprising effect. It is his most fascinating role.

In Michael Clayton, beleaguered lawyer/fixer/babysitter-to-the-rich Michael Clayton is caught between a rock, a hard place, and a soft place. The rock: the big New York law firm he works for, and their bigger, multi-billion-dollar multi-vertical corporate client. The hard place: that client’s Chief Counsel (an Academy Award-winningly nervy Tilda Swinton) and her own pair of fixers. The soft place: Arthur, Michael’s mentor, friend, and father figure, one of the firm’s top litigators, who has gone off his medication and suffered a prolonged mental break that threatens to cost the firm and its client hundreds of millions of dollars in a class-action case. Powder, keg, match.

Michael Clayton is an uncomfortable film, thanks mostly to Tom Wilkinson’s portrayal of Arthur’s one-man schizophrenic revolution and to Tilda Swinton’s sociopathic response to it. But that discomfort serves a purpose—to question why we’re uncomfortable. Is that what it takes to make a man realize that a system he is so thoroughly embedded in is so thoroughly broken? Is that what it looks like, when a career carpenter decides to burn the house down?

Still, we watch Michael tackle one problem after the next and the next in a downward spiral of fixing. It’s not that he’s ineffective—he is, as we’re told, the best at what he does—it’s that these events, for once, are out of his league. He’s one man, and they’re The Man. The fight grows increasingly futile; and still he fights. All while trying to get to his son’s baseball game (he’s an American hero).

If nothing else, the film features one of the great endings in thriller history, worth the price of admission (about $3.50 to rent) alone.

See also: Dark Waters (2019), another lawyer vs The Man drama (starring recurring bulldog Mark Ruffalo) based on the real-life discovery of the cancerous effects of Teflon.

Miami Vice (2004)

It’s bizarre how little neon and sunshine there is in Michael Mann’s 2004 revamp of his own hit 1980s TV property, Miami Vice. Where the original series has become a meme of 80s machismo and the “buddy cop” genre, this film sets the cheese almost entirely (almost entirely) aside in favor of a Heat-like hardboiled crime drama, with a few more boats and beaches sprinkled in.

Featuring a pair of memorable turns from a long-haired and mustachioed Colin Farrell and a suave Jamie Foxx as Miami PD Vice operatives Crockett and Tubbs, Miami Vice is a gritty narco epic that deserved more than what it got (largely, sneers and derision) on its initial release. Sometimes you just want to watch a couple fictional cops-who-are-also-friends take down some terrifyingly bad dudes, and that’s what this film gives us in delightfully gruff fashion.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

I remember the conversation around The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2011 going largely to the tune of, “Do we really need another Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie? The Swedish version is good enough! Why does Hollywood have to remake everything??” Having watched both movies in the last year, I can say that it is a very good thing Hollywood—David Fincher in particular—remade this one.

It’s not that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) is bad. It’s totally fine. Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist are excellent, and the film benefits in verisimilitude (fictional believability) from being set in its native language (Swedish). But it’s also a little shallow, comparatively, snipping away some of the twistier plot threads, and more straightforward. Its sequels are also, unfortunately, a bit of a slog.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) on the other hand is one of the better mysteries of the last decade. Like its cinematic predecessor and the book they’re based on, it plunges unflinchingly into pitch black, deeply distressing material—murder, sexual assault, and rape are gruesomely depicted—but offers us, in return, one of the screen’s most dynamic duos in Daniel Craig’s morally upstanding-if-naive journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Rooney Mara’s captivating hacker vigilante, Lizbeth Salander. They are not ass-kickers—though there is a nonzero amount of ass-kicking—they are dirtdiggers, heroes of research and analysis who spend a lot of time doing the kind of investigative work that Robert Pattinson’s moody Batman wishes he was capable of. And when they finally get their man…well, he gets very gotten. A deep dark film breeds a deep dark catharsis, but a catharsis nonetheless.

See also: Mindhunter, David Fincher’s Netflix series following the first official federal investigations of serial killers. Mindhunter employs a tell-don’t-show strategy in regards to the many terrible crimes of the many terrible murderers that is somehow more chilling, and infinitely more watchable, than depicting any of them in graphic detail. Mostly, though, it’s a joy to watch the crack squad of Jonathan Goff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv approach their…subjects…with a mix of academic fascination and human revulsion.

The Handmaiden (2016)

Speaking of catharsis…WHEW. This may be the most cathartic film I’ve ever watched. If you’ve ever enjoyed an erotic thriller, and have not yet enjoyed Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, stop now, enjoy it, thank me.

The Handmaiden boasts one of the great movie posters of our time. Here it is. It contains practically everything you need know about the movie going in. All I’ll add is that it is based on the book Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, a tale originally set in Victorian England about a young thief (a “fingersmith”) who infiltrates a wealthy household. That’s all I’ll give you, for fear of robbing you of the head-grabbing, hair-pulling, ick-inducing ride herein. It’s definitely a weird movie to say, “Hell yeah,” to, and yet: hell yeah.

The Verdict (1982)

Pivoting now to a more conservatively cathartic film in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict, a legal thriller featuring Paul Newman at arguably (a generous “arguably”) the height of his powers.

In The Verdict, Paul Newman is a loser. Literally. He’s a former hotshot lawyer who finds himself stuck working the dregs of the court, and losing those cases, too. Then, a friend does him one last reluctant favor and hands him an easy case, an open-and-shut settlement from a victim of malpractice by a major hospital. What Newman’s Frank Galvin sees, however, is his chance at that most tantalizing of rewards: a swift redemption. If he refuses settlement and instead takes the hospital—and his former, powerhouse firm representing them—to trial, well, he stands to make his clients more money, himself a chunk of change, and regain his standing in the legal world all in a single stroke. All that stands between him and that goal is an impossible case, a beautiful woman, and his damned conscience…

Watching Paul Newman lose is a treat. It’s not quite schadenfreude, we’re not getting joy out of his suffering, per say. It’s more like cheering for the underdog, in a film that does the rare thing of managing to make its bonafide movie star genuinely feel like an underdog. Frank Galvin is petty, unethical, and often flat out wrong. But despite himself, despite the seemingly impenetrable cynicism he’s constructed and the coat of alcohol he wears, he can’t help but give a shit. And when his fight turns real, The Verdict, again, doesn’t do the typical movie thing of, “Ah, now he gets it! He knows what he’s fighting for! It’s over for those guys!” The case remains practically impossible. The obstacles, if anything, increase. But we rooted for Newman as a broken man set against insurmountable odds, and we only root for him more as a complicated man set against the same. The result is a powerful, moving film about not only personal redemption, but competition, the nature of winning and losing and all the verdicts that fall between.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Mileage may vary with Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye depending on whether you currently do or don’t live in LA. It’s still a great movie if you don’t live here; but there’s something immensely, personally enjoyable about watching Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe cruise down Sunset and saunter up to his (honestly, sick as hell) Hollywood Hills apartment, tie hung loose, on his 20th cigarette already in the first minute. I know that this beleaguered PI is an outdated model of masculine ‘cool,’ and yet…goddamnit, he’s still cool. There’s also a slow-burning, morally dubious mystery at play, a femme fatale, a few accented gangsters a’gangstering; but I’m here to watch Elliot Gould take it all in imperturbable stride, never sleeping, never changing (his clothes), never really seeming to worry too much about the many deadly events occurring around him…until, finally, he does.

Chernobyl (2019)

Hard to find comfort in one of the most infamous manmade disasters in history. Easier, though, to find comfort in the efforts of Stellan Skarsgaard and Jared Harris to minimize the destruction of that disaster, and then uncover its root cause, in an investigation that digs into the faults underlying the principles of a nation.

The biggest piece of pushback I hear about Chernobyl, from people who haven’t watched it, is: “It looks sad.” That’s not wrong. It is a sad, tough show about a sad, tough subject. But ultimately Chernobyl isn’t about the sadness or the toughness; rather, it’s about all the people who step up in impossible times, and all the people who enabled the impossible to occur. It’s about the insidious reach of corruption and its nightmarish effects. It’s about science and expertise, and again about complicated men grasping a chance at redemption for a lifetime of rule-abiding. It’s about heroes and heroism, and whose stories are sung and unsung. Chernobyl, for its unflinching eye on the horrors of nuclear fallout, is a supremely hopeful tale about the letting the best rise in us, and the cost of it.

Also, there’s something soothing about watching Stellan Skarsgaard growl his way through every level of Soviet bureaucracy.

Am I missing any deep dark comfort films? Send me your grim (but again, hopeful!) recommendations in the comments, please! Thx.