Everyone remembers cinema’s great love affairs. From When Harry Met Sally to Casablanca, Hollywood has always adored stories of two people finding their soulmate in the least likely of circumstances. However, what happens when these relationships take a darker turn? Some films explore the tumultuous and destructive nature of love, showcasing how quickly things can go awry. This article dives deep into the 20 most toxic relationships portrayed on the silver screen, highlighting their complexities and the lessons we can learn from them.
While many romantic films celebrate love and connection, others serve as cautionary tales. The relationships featured in this list range from manipulative and destructive to downright dangerous. They remind us that not all love stories end happily, and some can leave emotional scars. As we examine these cinematic relationships, we’ll reflect on how they differ from the idealized versions of love we often see in mainstream media.
Join us as we explore the darker side of romance in cinema, from the wildly toxic to the painfully relatable. Here’s a look at the 20 most toxic relationships ever seen in film, providing insight into love that often blurs the line between passion and peril.
Table of Contents
- 20. Love Actually
- 19. Fatal Attraction
- 18. Happy Together
- 17. Twilight
- 16. Cold War
- 15. Basic Instinct
- 14. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
- 13. She’s All That
- 12. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
- 11. Marriage Story
- 10. The Breakfast Club
- 9. Blue Valentine
- 8. You’ve Got Mail
- 7. Beauty and the Beast
- 6. Passengers
- 5. Grease
- 4. Bad Timing
- 3. Gone Girl
- 2. Gaslight
- 1. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
20. Love Actually
It’s almost hard to pick the most toxic relationship from the smorgasbord of interconnecting romances in Love Actually. For my money, it’s probably the queasy relationship between Hugh Grant’s prime minister and junior staffer Martine McCutcheon. But there’s a wealth of choice here otherwise.
19. Fatal Attraction
The erotic thriller has been a fertile basis for exploring toxic relationships on screen, and Fatal Attraction is certainly no exception. While Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest – who becomes obsessed with Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) after a short sexual dalliance – may feed into some pretty problematic stereotypes (ahem, bunny boiler), the film still endures as a gripping portrayal of a truly troubling relationship.
18. Happy Together
Wong Kar Wai, perhaps cinema’s foremost trafficker of unfulfilled romantic yearning, depicted a chaotic love affair between two Hong Kong men (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung) in Argentina, in this modern queer classic. Happy Together is by turns funny and tragic, an idiosyncratic take on a strange and destructive relationship.
17. Twilight
I don’t think I’d be sticking my head too far above the parapet of age-gap discourse to suggest there’s something iffy about a 100-year-old vampire dating a teenage schoolgirl. The Twilight films are defiantly sentimental about Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) romance, but there’s no shaking the fact that theirs is a deeply toxic one.
16. Cold War
Another film that could have easily been titled “Toxic Relationship: The Movie”, 2018 Polish drama Cold War tracks the torrid romance between a talented young singer (Joanna Kulig) and a musical director (Tomasz Kot). There are moments of beauty and poignance in there, but mostly just the uneasy feeling of watching two people tailspin in mutually unhappy passion.
15. Basic Instinct
It doesn’t take a detective to suss that there’s something awry in the warped romance between Michael Douglas’s grizzled police investigator Nick Curran and Sharon Stone’s alluring novelist Catherine Tramell – who happens to be the prime suspect in Nick’s latest murder case. Sex and violence intertwine in Paul Verhoeven’s seminal erotic thriller.
14. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Pedro Almodóvar’s 1990 romance is the story of a courtship so garishly problematic that you kind of have to laugh. Antonio Banderas plays Ricky, a recently released psychiatric patient who kidnaps and imprisons Marina, a porn star (Victoria Abril). Eventually – and inevitably – she falls in love with her dysfunctional captor. A sick, provocative delight to watch.
13. She’s All That
The 1999 teen romcom She’s All That was a fast hit when it first came out, but the years have not been kind to its central relationship. Freddie Prinze Jr plays high-school jock Zack Siler, while Rachael Leigh Cook is Laney Boggs, the gauche loner who, against the odds, wins his affections – but only after physically reinventing herself with a drastic makeover.
12. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
One of the many, many problematic romcoms from the Nineties-Noughties rom-com genre boom, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days centres on a pretty shameful relationship between Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. With both parties manipulating and deceiving the other throughout, the film also promotes a number of lazy gendered clichés about dating.
11. Marriage Story
There are moments of real gut-wrenching vitriol between feuding spouses Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Noah Baumbach’s Oscar-winning 2019 drama. Even though the scene has been memed into oblivion, there’s no denying the visceral unpleasantness to watching Adam
