If Valentine’s Day makes you cranky or just bores you as a concept, you aren’t alone. For every person who takes the day as a prompt for big romantic gestures or warm feelings, there’s someone who thinks of it either as a crass, commercial, empty holiday, or a conspiracy to make single people feel bad about their lives. But whether you’re actively annoyed about Valentine’s Day or just enjoy a good, dark down-with-romance movie any day of the year, Polygon has you covered. Here are some of our favorite anti-romance movies, and where to stream them.
1
Midsommar (2019)
Ari Aster’s unnerving horror movie about a terrible couple navigating a terrible tragedy really ups the ante on break-up scenes. Dani (Florence Pugh) is disintegrating after the deaths of her sister and parents, and her weak-willed boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), who was planning to dump her, can’t figure out how to do it in the wake of such a huge loss. So he lets their relationship limp along, even letting Dani join him and his friends on a vacation that doubles as a grad-school thesis project. Visiting a secretive rural commune in Sweden to observe a midsummer festival, they run afoul of a cult that gives Dani what she most needs — which definitely isn’t her current relationship.
Where to watch: Available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
2
The War of the Roses (1989)
Forget the 2025 retread The Roses. This dark comedy, directed by Danny DeVito and starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, is a love-gone-wrong classic; a bleak comedy that draws on Douglas and Turner’s reputation as a sparky, sexy couple in Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile. Here, they’re the perfect professional couple, until their kids are about to leave for college and a health scare exposes the cracks in a relationship neither of them had really examined. What starts out as a petty divorce feud escalates into a hilariously over-the-top game of one-upsmanship, as the separating couple looks for bigger and bigger ways to hurt each other. That sounds grim, but it plays more like an eat-the-rich movie where the only people suffering are the hateful, vindictive, well-off duo who most deserve it.
Where to watch: Available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
3
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
The Oscar-sweeping all-time classic among feuding-couples movies, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf adapts Edward Albee’s scorching play about an aging couple who love and hate each other in equal measure, and turn other people into an audience for their misery. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play Martha and George, a middle-aged pair with an obviously long, fraught personal history. Over the course of the film, they have a young couple over to dinner, and the meal becomes a staging ground for George and Martha’s old grievances. It’s Mike Nichols’ directorial debut, and one of his greatest movies, up there with The Graduate and Catch-22. Albee’s dialogue still sparkles with hateful wit, and Taylor and Burton throw themselves into their characters full-force.
Where to watch: Available on Spectrum on Demand, and for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
4
Ready or Not (2019)
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s sick and twisted horror movie about a bride being hunted for sport is fairly trashy, and that’s what makes it so much fun. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality to the whole thing, starting with the premise: Right after marrying into an ultra-rich family, Grace (Samara Weaving) has to survive a “traditional family game” where the family chases her through their immense estate, trying to murder her. The script is clever and surprising, and Weaving is an appealingly gritty protagonist. The entire concept is contrived and requires a certain amount of “OK, let’s just see where this is going…” buy-in from an indulgent audience, but the suspension of disbelief pays off. The twisty plot, the commitment to gory mayhem, and Grace’s resourcefulness and daring turned Ready Or Not into enough of a small-scale hit to prompt a sequel, arriving shortly.
Where to watch: Streaming on FuboTV and FXNow, and available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
5
The Lobster (2015)
Yorgos Lanthimos’ bizarro-world fantasy was prompted by his feeling that society is hatefully biased against single people, which he translated into a setting where everyone is forced to be part of a couple, on pain of a fate weirder than death. Colin Farrell plays David, a stodgy man remanded to an institution called The Hotel after his wife leaves him for someone else. He’s told he has 45 days to find a new partner among the other single folks, or he’ll be turned into an animal of his choosing. The Lobster is technically a dark comedy, but like many of Lanthimos’ films (Dogtooth, The Favourite, Poor Things), it’s a particularly straight-faced one, where the characters say and do preposterous things without a hint of overt humor. There’s a hypnotic draw to this creepy, oppressive world, and to David’s forlorn place in it. People facing Valentine’s Day alone may well empathize with his feeling that he’s being forced to conform to rules that make no sense, when he just wants love — or to be left in peace.
Where to watch: Streaming on HBO Max and available on Spectrum On Demand, as well as Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
6
The Last Seduction (1994)
A gloriously nasty neo-noir crime film that treats romance as one more weapon in the arsenal of a master schemer, The Last Seduction gives neo-noir director John Dahl one of his best scripts, and Linda Fiorentino one of her all-time best roles. Fiorentino plays Bridget, an ambitious, predatory woman whose doctor husband Clay (Bill Pullman) is deep in debt to a loan shark, and has just pulled off a drug deal to pay him off. Bridget decides to celebrate the score by double-crossing her husband and running off with the money, but circumstances force her to hide in a small town, where she sets about trying to rope down-on-his-luck local boy Mike (Peter Berg) into her next scheme. The Last Seduction is endlessly, gleefully cynical about love, romance, relationships, and even casual sex. But what else can you expect when the ruthless femme fatale is the protagonist and everyone else is a patsy?
Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video, Fawesome, Hoopla, and Shout Factory TV. Free with ads on Tubi, Pluto, and Plex. Available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
7
Audition (1999)
Takashi Miike’s chilly movie Audition is tailor-made for jaded horror fans who think they’ve seen it all and are unshakable. Needle-phobes, beware of this one! Ryo Ishibashi stars as Shigeharu, a middle-aged widower who decides to find a new wife by faking a casting call for the lead role in a TV series. That grotesque deception leads to grotesque results when a woman with a terrifying agenda (Eihi Shiina) enters his life through the audition. You could choose to see this as a morality tale about relationships, and how any connection made through selfishness and dishonesty is bound to be poisonous. But you can also just take it as a singularly nasty, effective clap back against romantic movies, and the “all’s fair in love, war, and rom-com contrivances” movie philosophy.
Where to watch: Streaming on Kanopy, Shudder, and Hi-YAH. Free with ads on Tubi. Available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
8
Gaslight (1944)
The trope-namer that gave us the concept of gaslighting is still a great psychological thriller, an edged contest of wills between cruel husband Gregory (Charles Boyer) and his disintegrating new wife Paula (Ingrid Bergman). First-time viewers will understand that there’s something ugly going on under the surface, as Gregory accuses Paula of things that make no sense, openly flirts with her maid, and responds to Paula’s increasing agitation with brutal contempt. But unpacking what’s actually going on between them and why is an enjoyably Hitchcockian process, a mystery that director George Cukor (adapting a 1938 play) unfolds carefully and with expert tension. It’s an all-time classic among “relationship gone wrong” movies, and a lot more nuanced than the modern term “gaslighting” would suggest.
Where to watch: Free with ads on XumoPlay. Available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
9
What Keeps You Alive (2018)
Colin Minihan’s What Keeps You Alive feels unusually raw and muscular for a queer horror movie, and with good reason. It was written as a straight horror-thriller, which changed when the male actor Minihan wanted as one of the leads backed out a month before shooting, and Minihan replaced him with a woman. This is another “new romance is actually a bad romance” movie, where a young woman (Brittany Allen) celebrating her first anniversary with her wife (Hannah Emily Anderson) finds out she doesn’t really know who she married, or the real agenda behind their relationship. Creeping dread turns to bloody mayhem, delivered with a lot of style — this is a grim movie, but an immersive one, a surprising micro-indie obviously made on a small budget, but with a lot of verve and flavor.
Where to watch: Streaming on Kanopy, Sundance Now, and AMC+. Free with ads on Tubi. Available for rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital services.
10
Upside Down (2012)
A lot of these movies are anti-love and anti-romance in dark, ugly, cynical, or murderous ways, and not everyone is into that. If you’re looking for something lighter, you could always just get some deep, cleansing laughter out of watching the hilariously wrong-headed, incoherent mess Upside Down. This movie was clearly designed as a sweet, moving high-concept science fiction fable, with visuals seemingly inspired by Inception, and familiar stars Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst in the lead roles. But the premise — two planets with opposite-direction gravity, stuck together just yards apart, with one being a rich utopia and the other a downtrodden slum — doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the screenwriters seem to forget their own rules from scene to scene. This wide-eyed, sentimental love story is one of the most hilariously misbegotten romances ever made, and just watching it should be enough to make anyone feel a little better about the dummies trying to package up love and sell it as a media product.
Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video, Kanopy, and Hoopla. Free with ads on Tubi, Fandango, and Roku Channel. Available for rent or purchase on Amazon.
