Entertainment
10 Most Anxiety-Inducing Romance Movies, Ranked
Romance films are often nice, and romantic comedies in particular tend to be rather gentle, not to mention prime candidates if you’re looking for a good comfort movie. Something like When Harry Met Sally is a very pleasant and almost impossible-to-dislike film, and then even iconic romantic movies that are a little more bittersweet, like Casablanca, couldn’t really be called heavy or anxiety-inducing.
So, the following movies ultimately stand out, within the whole romance genre. Admittedly, many of these are romantic thrillers, or function as psychological dramas on top of being romance films, but if romance is a prominent genre in a given film, then said film can qualify for appearing here. If you’re sort of sick of pleasant and/or sentimental films about love, for whatever reason, then maybe these anxiety-inducing romance movies will be more up your alley.
10
‘Love’ (2015)
Gaspar Noé isn’t really in the business of making nice movies, to put it very, very mildly. The most approachable thing he’s made is probably Vortex (2021), which doesn’t have anything by way of graphic violence or intense sexual content (the stuff Noé is especially infamous for), but it is a grueling and psychologically harrowing watch, since it’s about two old people struggling to get by because of worsening health issues.
Love is just very uneasy throughout, and the opposite of a good date night movie.
Yes, that’s as “pleasant” as things get with Gaspar Noé, and so his movie called Love isn’t very lovely, or in any way easy to watch. It’s about a couple who shake up their sex lives by inviting in a third participant, so to speak, and then things get complicated and intense for a whole bunch of reasons. Love is just very uneasy throughout, and the opposite of a good date night movie, even if it is technically well within the bounds of the romance genre.
9
‘The Piano Teacher’ (2001)
It’s a Michael Haneke movie, so of course it’s going to be despairing. He’s a bit like Gaspar Noé in the sense that even when a film of his doesn’t have extreme content, it’s still extremely distressing (see Amour, which, like Noé’s Vortex, is also a difficult movie about aging). The Piano Teacher is one of Haneke’s best-known films, and it’s kind of a romance? Barely. It’s more of a psychological drama.
It does involve a piano teacher struggling with various things after a younger man starts trying to instigate a romantic relationship with her, so in that sense, it’s broadly about love and longing, but without being very romantic. The Piano Teacher is all very unpleasant and harrowing in its exploration of a troubled mind, and while it’s not non-stop with showing extreme stuff, it does pepper in a good deal of imagery that’s ultimately hard to shake.
8
‘Miracle Mile’ (1988)
If After Hours had a bit less of a Kafkaesque feel, and involved all of society falling apart rather than just the life of one very unlucky man, then it would probably look and feel a little like Miracle Mile. Both movies came out in the 1980s, and are darkly comedic, not to mention fast-paced, all the while having premises that involve first dates – or at least an attempt at a first date – going quite wrong.
With Miracle Mile, society is breaking down in rapid succession because nuclear war is imminent, so everyone has to grapple with the fact that they might all be about to die, and the two main characters still want to do something with each other for their potential last night on Earth. It’s so many different genres at once, and veers off in various wild directions tonally speaking, but all in a way that’s pretty admirable, even if the film’s kind of a mess at the same time.
7
‘The Lovers on the Bridge’ (1991)
The Lovers on the Bridge is about two downtrodden and troubled people who both find themselves living on the streets, particularly on and around the bridge referred to in the title: the Pont Neuf in Paris. One of them is struggling with addiction, and the other is feeling despondent after a break-up and a health condition that’s making her gradually lose her vision.
It’s all very miserable, by design, and The Lovers on the Bridge also has some confronting imagery and occasional violent situations that drive home a further feeling of angst on top of all the difficulties the characters are already grappling with. It feels a bit like descending into some emotionally taxing territory you can’t ever really climb out of, so calling the film a difficult watch would be a huge understatement. It’s very good, though, for what that’s worth, as contradictory as that could sound.
6
‘Bitter Moon’ (1992)
Erotic thrillers were all the rage for a little while there, say, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mostly in the sense that a few got genuine mainstream attention and became unlikely blockbusters, in terms of box office revenue. Bitter Moon came out around this time, and it had a premise that largely revolved around a man on a cruise ship becoming obsessed with the wife of another man on board that same ship.
Lots of Bitter Moon is made up of flashbacks leading up to the cruise, and then inevitable drama during it. The whole thing is uneasy and oftentimes suspenseful, and while Bitter Moon is too flawed to be a genuinely great movie, it does have its moments for sure, and is intense/bold enough, for the most part, to be worthy of inclusion here.
5
‘The Drama’ (2026)
Easily the most recent movie here, The Drama does already feel like it could be something of an infamous all-timer, as far as anxiety-inducing romance films are concerned. Part of that has to do with the fact that for the first few scenes, or maybe even the first act, it feels quite sappy and by-the-numbers, as a surprisingly not too quirky rom-com, but that’s all to ensure you’re caught off guard by what the movie’s really about.
It’s revealed early on, but the specifics lie within spoiler territory (the trailer doesn’t elaborate), so what can be said is that a soon-to-be-married couple find new stress in the lead-up to their wedding, when a secret from one of their pasts is revealed. The Drama explores some very dark thematic territory while also being quite funny at times, and then proves capable of building an incredible amount of tension (especially in its second half) for something that isn’t a thriller.
4
‘Badlands’ (1973)
Badlands is an arthouse film, but not too unapproachable or obscure compared to most movies that can be classified as such. It’s about a couple in love who go on the run after the young man in the relationship murders the father of the young woman, and then while they’re on the run from the law, he ends up committing a few more murders.
It’s a film that proves quite startling with its violence, even if that violence isn’t particularly graphic… more so that it just comes out of nowhere at certain times, and also ends up being treated quite casually by the person doing the murders. Badlands might sound a bit strange, being a road movie, a gritty crime film, and also something about young (and potentially naïve) love, but it works really well, and still feels unlike pretty much anything else out there.
3
‘Happy Together’ (1997)
There are just two main characters, really, at the center of Happy Together: a pair of men who find their relationship heading toward ruin, so they try to reinvigorate things by traveling to Argentina together. The change of scenery doesn’t help as much as they’d planned, because various issues keep popping up, and the film pretty frequently explores the pair clashing and arguing in increasingly intense ways.
So, safe to say, that title is kind of ironic. And Happy Together works as more of a break-up film than a romance one in the traditional sense, which is something you could also say about Chungking Express (like Happy Together, that one was directed by Wong Kar-wai), but Chungking Express was a good deal more bittersweet, and not as intense. Happy Together does offer some catharsis, and it’s not, like, 100% miserable, but the downbeat sections of the film do hit incredibly hard, all the while feeling remarkably raw.
2
‘Punch-Drunk Love’ (2002)
You get a pretty simple story told over a relatively brisk 90-ish minutes in Punch-Drunk Love, but there is complexity here that comes about because of how good a character study it is, and also because it’s quite adventurous in terms of tone and genre(s). It’s sort of a romantic comedy, but a psychological drama/thriller at the same time… kind of? It’s hard to explain and define, but you get a similar feeling watching it as you get from The Drama.
Punch-Drunk Love also houses what’s probably Adam Sandler’s second-best performance, topped only by what he did in the also anxiety-inducing 2019 film, Uncut Gems. Punch-Drunk Love is funny at times, borderline-disturbing at other points, and then ultimately surprisingly romantic, too, standing alongside One Battle After Another as a film that shows how, when Paul Thomas Anderson wants to tackle a bunch of genres at once, he can do so pretty darn well.
1
‘Scenes from a Marriage’ (1974)
You can sort of compare Scenes from a Marriage to the more recent Marriage Story, owing to both of the movies having titles that share a word, and also the fact that both movies are ultimately about divorce. Marriage Story is only listed as a drama on most sites, though, while Scenes from a Marriage gets both the “drama” and “romance” labels on Letterboxd, so that’s why it’s here instead of Marriage Story.
Maybe that’s because Scenes from a Marriage has a little more to do with preventing the relationship from ending, at least early on, building toward a sense that it has to end, while Marriage Story lets you know it’s about divorce right from the start. Anyway, the point is that Scenes from a Marriage is incredibly anxiety-inducing, just because it really feels like watching a series of real-life arguments, one after the other, for almost three hours (and much longer if you watch the miniseries version, which came out one year earlier and is probably therefore the definitive cut).
Scenes From a Marriage
- Release Date
-
September 15, 1974
- Runtime
-
169 minutes
- Director
-
Ingmar Bergman
- Writers
-
Ingmar Bergman
You must be logged in to post a comment Login