Good news: two new comedies hit British cinemas this week. Bad news: they’re both bleak as hell. Especially unexpected in this respect is Nine Lives. It sounded so fluffy: Kevin Spacey’s millionaire executive learns to be a better dad after he’s trapped in the body of a cat by Christopher Walken’s magical pet shop owner. But aside from the odd moment of litter-tray high jinks, this is a family film fixated on divorce, alcoholism, suicide, cyber-bullying, “do not resuscitate” directives and a hostile corporate takeover.

Such a dynamic might not always be comedy gold, but it does ring true. The intergenerational climate is chilly

That the David Brent movie turns out to be tragicomic is less surprising. The Office long worried at the edge of despair. The big-screen spin-off, Life on the Road, dives in headfirst, plumbing depths of depression. The gleeful excruciation of the TV series is stretched into a rictus grin, then a horror show. These days there are shades of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in Ricky Gervais’s tactless prat, now a sanitary products salesman, who cashes in all his savings and pensions to go on tour (eight dates, round Slough), in a last-ditch attempt at pop stardom. Brent hires some session musicians, about 25 years his junior, who regard him with unalloyed scorn. As do the audience.

Melina Weissman, Kevin Spacey (centre) and Christopher Walken in Nine Lives. Photograph: Takashi Seida/PR

What these two strange, sad films share is a permitted loathing of their central characters: middle-aged men who, for all their foibles, are trying their best. Spacey spends much of his story in a coma, during which his family see fit to bitch about him over cake and champagne. That his much-maligned work ethic has funded their bubbles isn’t mentioned. Gervais lavishes luxuries on his band and is repaid with contempt. Not only must he pay their wages and bills, but also for them to have a drink with him after the show. The crowds roll their eyes at the old fart, yet still take home the free T-shirt.

Such a dynamic might not always be comedy gold, but it does ring true. The intergenerational climate is chilly. An increasingly brutal youth has less and less patience with its elders. Instead, there is scorn, even an edge of savagery.

This feeling gathered steam post-Brexit, as it emerged that the majority of 18-24s who had voted opted to remain, while the picture was flipped for the retired. Calls mounted for voting to be capped at 65. How dare people who probably have less time to live with the consequences have an equal say in the outcome? It’s a measure of how received this wisdom has become that such lobbying for discrimination was tolerated. Would calls to curb the rights of other groups be countenanced? And what about democracy? Or experience? Or altruism?

Anyway, this kind of brainless rhetoric further legitimises the notion that anyone more than halfway through life is a fatcat purring over a pension pot. Bodies such as the Intergenerational Foundation purport to promote “fairness between generations”, but in fact push an agenda of diverting public funds away from those who have paid in the longest.

Yet they need public funds too. The young bemoan their student loans, but residential home fees now average £30,000 a year, and social care – unlike health and education – does not have the benefit of a ringfence. There is already ample validation for anyone who is eager to consign the elderly to the scrapheap to do so. New excuses for marginalisation are not required, and are dangerous. Abuse of the over-70s is far more prevalent than in other demographics: under-reported, and often fatal.

The young can’t be blamed for riding a tide of rage. It’s hard to reconcile a culture that puts youth on a pedestal but denies them access to the purse strings. Frustration levels rise when you feel impotent, or when those around you act so. After all, even though referendum turnout among new voters was higher than first reported, it was still 26 percentage points fewer than among the over-65s.

Yet indulging such anger is unwise. Especially when it may also be the product of the mistranslation by the young of an older generation’s self-deprecation. In The Possibility of an Island, the French writer Michel Houellebecq, identifies something shameful about such a state. “In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo, into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old … I was an ageing man, this was my disgrace – to borrow Coetzee’s term; it seemed perfect to me, I could think of no better word, and this moral freedom that is charming, fresh and seductive in adolescents could only become in my case, the repellent insistence of an old fart who refuses to give up the ghost.”

The young have adopted this scepticism as fact. They loudly protest their unhappiness at the apparent status quo, cross to be dependent on the bank of mum and dad and taking it out on the tellers. Giving them a platform on which to do so is good. But actively encouraging a sense of vicious disenfranchisement may not be healthy for anyone.

Young robins kill the old in the winter, the saying used to go. It was wrong: they don’t. That was just a misinterpretation of bird behaviour based on a human assumption that such a dynamic was the natural order. Robins kill their own only in territorial disputes. They are not like people. Let’s hope we’re not on the brink of a turf war.