15 Anti-Valentine’s Day Movies That Remind You Love Can Suck
Reading Time: 6 minutesFilms for when you’re feeling a certain kind of way about Valentine’s Day.
Is Valentine’s Day a beautiful tribute to one of the most fundamental parts of the human experience, or a made-up holiday designed to make you spend money you don’t have on candy nobody wants? Perhaps it’s both, but there’s no question many Feb. 14 rituals are outdated and limiting, proceeding from the assumption that everyone wants a romantic relationship—usually a cis, straight one. Mere greeting cards for gay couples are hard to come by; finding any that celebrate other types relationship is pretty much impossible. (Note to card companies: polyamory means more people in a relationship, and thus more cards to sell.)
Which is all to say that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with ignoring the holiday, or even hating on it a little. And if you do either, you can still mark the occasion with a film that will remind you romances often go wrong, and that love can actually be kind of terrible: toxic, misguided, all-consuming in a bad way. These are movies to watch alone, or with your partner (who is a realist).
While director Guillermo del Toro’s last Oscar contender, The Shape of Water, was something of a fairytale romance, Nightmare Alley represents a turn down the darkest alleys of old-school noir. The 1947 original is a particularly nasty bit of business, as is William Lindsay Gresham crime novel upon which both films are based. The remake os very much the kind of movie that they don’t make anymore—big stars in a high-concept dark drama—and one in which any lessons learned are learned way, way too late. Relationships in various permutations blossom between characters played by Toni Colette, Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara, David Strathairn, Cate Blanchett and, as brilliant as those actors all are, none of their onscreen entanglements end well (and most end in tragedy). It’s enough to make even the most die-hard romantic think twice before trusting someone with their heart.
Where to stream: HBO Max, Hulu
Encouraged by the catty, incorrigible Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), Frankenstein (OK, fine: Frankenstein’s monster) becomes convinced he can escape from his own loneliness only in the arms of another of his own kind. Of course, he’s unique, so the only solution is to build a bride. Which is a bad idea on its face, but the doctor, Henry Frankenstein’s old mentor, is too interested in playing god (and making time with the handsome young Henry) to be bothered with any of that. The Bride naturally isn’t thrilled with the situation, nor interested in starting a relationship mere minutes after her own reanimation, forcing the monster to conclude they’d all be better off dead (again)—an extreme decision, certainly, but one that captures the mood at the end of any bad romance.
Where to stream: Shudder
Who’s manipulating who in Hitchcock’s greatest film? When retired San Francisco detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is hired by an old friend, the job seems pretty straightforward: follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) and find out what she’s up to. Except that the job becomes an obsession…one that continues even after Maddie’s death. Is it just a coincidence that he soon encounters a woman who looks just like her, even if it takes a bit of coaxing in order to bring out the resemblance? Bottom line: trying to mold someone into your image of a perfect partner is a quick way to guarantee tragedy.
Where to stream: Digital rental
In the pantheon of ‘what I did for love’ movies, robbing a bank is perhaps not the worst thing anyone has done, or even the most dramatic. Results, however, do matter: Al Pacino’s Sonny (based on the real-life John Wojtowicz) is determined to get the money for his wife’s gender reassignment surgery, which would be sweet if the resulting robbery didn’t go so dramatically south. This one’s less a case of love gone wrong than an exhortation to only rob a bank for your loved one if you’re very, very good at it. It’s also a reminder that the American healthcare system, now as in the ’70s, is in such a state that one might need to rob a bank just to pay for a necessary medical procedure. Which is dumb and bad.
Where to stream: HBO Max
Things seem promising, perhaps, for Serbian émigré Irena Dubrovna (the always flawless Simone Simon) and engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) following their meet-cute at the zoo. What follows, however, is a dark parable about the dangers of failing to connect: Oliver, with his literal-minded American optimism, can’t see that Irena’s old-world superstitions are grounded in deep trauma (and also that she may or may not be a panther lady). Sometimes, people’s world views are just too far apart, no matter how much they’d like for things to work out.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Four supportive friends (played by all-stars Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Lela Rochon, and Loretta Devine) in not-great relationships are all holding their breaths waiting for the perfect man. There’s no tragedy here, but, by the end, each comes to realize there are many different paths to lasting happiness, most of which don’t involve waiting around for a dude to make things right.
Where to stream: HBO Max, Fubo, Max Go
Each of the four versions of this particular story (dating back to 1937) carries a similar message. All involving up-and-coming female entertainers who are at first supported, and then hamstrung by the substance-dependent men with whom they’ve fallen in love. In the most recent take, it’s Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper who set off on a long and intoxicating downward spiral, and it ends no better for them than it did for Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. Or Judy Garland and James Mason. Or Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. There’s virtue in standing by the one you love, but the message is clear: Even the most epic love can’t change someone who doesn’t want to change.
Where to stream: TNT, TBS, Tru TV
Less tragic than A Star is Born, but still poignant (and similarly lauded at the Academy Awards), La La Land begins as a romantic musical fairytale about a talented musician (Ryan Gosling) and the aspiring actress (Emma Stone) with whom he falls in love. Ultimately, their divergent ambitions drive them apart—and though it’s sad, their choices come off as entirely reasonable. But also sad.
Where to stream: Hulu
Nagisa Ōshima’s gorgeous, sensuous, sexually explicit masterpiece deals frankly with sexual freedom and obsession in a time of rising imperialism for Japan (the movie’s set in 1936, and based on a real incident). Without giving too much away, our lovers (played by Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji) come to discover that passion without limits can quickly turn to horror.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel
Romance and politics rarely mix well, and love without some degree of equality between the partners is just as often doomed to fail. And so here, in the story of a historical love triangle between the tempestuous and flighty Queen Anne, her powerful confidant Sarah Churchill, and impoverished courtier Abigail Masham, we see how dramatically wrong relationships can go. Anne has all the power, ostensibly, but none of the will to use it. Lady Sarah wields massive political power thanks to her influence, and Abigail weaponizes her sexual appeal in order to displace her rivals. It’s all a cleverly filmed and darkly funny tangle, but hardly makes a case for love that conquers all—it’s the one form of power nobody here has much interest in.
Where to stream: Digital rental
There are few movies that make a case for staying single quite as well as this over-the-top divorce fantasy, which imagines the breakdown of a marriage as an escalating series of physical and psychological battles nearly as dramatic as the historic conflicts that the title references. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play one of cinema’s all-time worst couples, ably assisted by lawyer-friend Danny DeVito (who also directs this macabre cartoon), and it’s all deliciously anti-love.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Another portrait of a disintegrating relationship, this one lacking the dark comedy of War of the Roses and, instead, going for the gut punch with a nonlinear narrative that bounces between moments in the doomed love story of Cindy and Dean, played by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. Though it received a rather inexplicable initial NC-17 rating, it managed to do reasonably well at the box office, and earned Williams an Oscar nomination.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel, Vudu
Though time has rendered the case somewhat obscure, the real-life trial of Claus von Bülow (played to icy perfection in the movie by Jeremy Irons) was a cause célèbre in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the relationship between Claus and his wife, Sunny (Glenn Close) briefly becoming pop-culture shorthand for the ill-conceived romance. The movie depicts both that troubled marriage and the Claus’ subsequent trial for the murder of his wife—and while it’s unclear whether he actually killed Sunny or just had a particularly convincing lawyer, he seems perfectly happy that she’s dead.
Where to stream: Kanopy
Directed and starring the late Sidney Poitier, A Warm December blends romance and old-fashioned melodrama with a more modern style. The female lead (Esther Anderson) is more than the equal of Poitier’s widowed doctor: she’s a dignitary and diplomat from an unnamed African country, and an integral part of negotiations with the Soviet Union. She also has terminal sickle-cell disease, so there’s no scenario in which the movie will end unambiguously happily. She’s forced to choose, in the end, how she plans to spend her remaining time: with the handsome and compelling doctor, or doing work that will benefit her country. Love, she concludes, can’t be her top priority.
Where to stream: Tubi
Director Wong Kar-wai’s achievement here is in making one of cinema’s most ill-suited couples so incredibly compelling: as viewers, we want to see Lai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Ho (Leslie Cheung) together, and yet we feel a little guilty for wishing such a tempestuous love affair on anyone. While on vacation, the two lose all their money and wind up stuck in Argentina, the stress of the situation sending them in separate directions. There’s a real fire and passion between the two, but any romance that involves one partner stealing the other’s passport is more than likely doomed to fail.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Criterion Channel