This is the debut episode of our new Misery Tourism podcast, Misery Movies, a round-table discussion with a focus on films about human suffering. Each episode will feature a deep dive into a single miserable film, and will include spoiler-free overviews and reviews of the movie in its first half followed by a more in-depth analysis of the film (yes, including spoilers).

Since this first episode is something of a proof-of-concept experiment, there are some intermittent audio-quality issues throughout the recording and some other sloppy parts. We hope future episodes will improve in presentation, if not in content.

This episode’s piece of sorrowful cinema is Guy Maddin’s 1992 art-house oddity Careful. If you’d like to watch the film for yourself (which, uh, is kind of the point, I guess?), it’s available to stream on Fandor and Amazon Prime Instant Video.

You can also watch an unedited version of the podcast conversation on our YouTube channel, but please bear in mind that the video quality is extremely poor in parts.