The 20 most toxic movie relationships, ranked

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.

But things don’t always work out that way.

Some films opt to delve into the darker side of romance – of love affairs that quickly go sour and spiral into destruction.

Often, this is deliberate. Films such as Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing or Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine steer viewers through the choppy waters of a toxic relationship. All you can do is watch through your fingers in horror as something once sacred goes painfully wrong.

Sometimes, however, the toxicity is entire accidental – a horrific mismatch of people that’s framed as a heartwarming love story (something that’s particularly prevalent in older films like Grease or The Breakfast Club, in which troubling relationships are scrutinised more harshly decades after release).

Here, then, is The Independent’s ranking of the 20 most toxic relationships ever seen in film….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Verhoevan’s seminal erotic thriller.

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.

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.

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 cliches about dating.

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 Driver spit the words, “Everyday I wake up and I hope you‘re dead,” at the mother of his child.

Much of John Hughes’s oeuvre could probably feature on this list; from Weird Science to Sixteen Candles, his teen comedies are peppered with inappropriate, toxic or downright reprehensible romances. But for many, it’s The Breakfast Club that irks the most, specifically the getting-together of the boorish, sexually harrassive John Bender (Judd Nelson) and Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald). Ringwald later admitted as much, reevaluating the film’s troubling romance in an essay for the New Yorker.

Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 drama tracked the highs and lows of a turbulent relationship between a nurse (Michelle Williams) and a volatile blue-collar worker (Ryan Gosling). Intimate and heartbreaking, Blue Valentine presents its destructive central relationship with a near-unparallelled candour; the breakdown stings all the more because the courtship is so winningly heartfelt.

Whether or not you subscribe to the idea that opposites attract, there’s more at play than just warring sensibilities in Nora Ephron’s 1998 romcom You’ve Got Mail. Tom Hanks’s character, Joe Fox, is a pure, corporatised asshole; Megan Ryan plays his unwitting pen pal, a quietly melancholy bookshop idealist. Adapted from the 1930s classic The Shop Around the Corner, Ephron makes the whole thing nastier and more jaded, and the central relationship here is littered with red flags.

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