15 Best Dark Romance Movies, Ranked

With all due respect to clean, uplifting, straightforwardly sweeping romances, sometimes there’s nothing better than a movie that understands love’s power of destruction. There’s something timelessly alluring about a romance tale that veers into dark, untold places — whether by exploring the secret underside of the romance itself, arriving at the romance through a twisty and wretched path, letting the romance explode into violent catharsis (or lack thereof), or seeing what happens when the romance brushes up against the brutality of the external world.

Below, you’ll find a ranking of 15 great dark romance movies from every era of film history that do all that, telling love stories too somber, bloody, turbulent, or otherwise twisted to inspire anyone’s wedding vows — unless the couple in question is into some real off-the-cuff stuff. From a defiant medieval life partnership to a dangerous mid-20th-century Californian obsession, these are the best dark romance movies of all time.

Based on the eponymous Christopher Marlowe play about the life of Edward II, King of England from 1307 to 1327, Derek Jarman’s “Edward II” is structured around the relationship between Edward (Steven Waddington) and Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), his longtime friend and lover. The court, the military, the church, and the entire nation of England are determined to pull Edward and Gaveston apart, yet they remain steadfastly devoted to each other, fully immersed in a world of fiery, unapologetic passion. Betrayals, conspiracies, and violent double-crossings ensue as the two men’s love comes up against increasing societal resistance — with Edward’s neglected French wife, Queen Isabella (a scene-stealing Tilda Swinton), as one of the masterminds plotting against them.

Charged with beauty, eroticism, darkness, and lush physicality like all of Jarman’s work, “Edward II” is also told in his typical anachronistic style, melding period-appropriate Medieval stylings with contemporary costume and set design and references to the English gay rights movement of the ’90s. It’s one of the most gripping and unique love stories ever committed to film.

Like most films in the career of Elaine May, the most misunderstood and underrated of New Hollywood masters, “A New Leaf” was originally a box office flop. But, unlike May’s later, even more unprofitable “Ishtar,” “A New Leaf” was a critical success right off the bat. Its failure to find a sizable theatrical audience could be chalked up not to any widespread perception that it was a disaster, but to the fact that it was simply too bold and caustic a romcom for mainstream audiences.

To this day, May’s 1971 film, which she scripted herself from a story by Jack Ritchie, is still one of the most gloriously twisted offerings in the history of romantic comedies — with that darkness applying equally to the “romantic” and “comedy” parts of the equation. A never-better Walter Matthau plays Henry Graham, an immature New York City playboy who must find a way to sustain his lavish lifestyle after spending away all his inheritance. He settles on wooing, marrying, and murdering fabulously wealthy botany professor Henrietta Lowell (May). Things, of course, don’t go according to plan, and an utterly fascinating romantic dynamic emerges between the cynical Henry and the clumsy and naive Henrietta. The kicker, though, is that the movie never alleviates the darkness underlying it all — instead, it plays the darkness for increasingly delirious and scathing humor, parodying romcom trappings while somehow coming up with its own utterly satisfying rendition. You have to see it to believe it.

A film so bold and uncompromising in its depiction of Berlin gay life that it stands out as a shock to the system of heteronormative cinema to this day, Frank Ripploh’s “Taxi zum Klo” (title sometimes translated as “Taxi to the Toilet”) is an essential document of queer life at a crucial juncture. Made in 1980 — at the height of the post-gay liberation era in West Germany, yet just prior to the outset of the AIDS crisis — by a cast and crew of gay men who were themselves actively involved in the scene it depicts, it is one of the most forthright movies ever made about sex between men, candidly depicting everything from cruising to BDSM and back. Equally essential and fascinating is the way it depicts the story of a crumbling relationship.

Frank (Ripploh) and Bernd (Bernd Broaderup), a schoolteacher and a film theater worker, are a loving couple with differing desires: Bernd longs for quietude, domesticity, and a stable life with his partner, while Frank is an inveterate sexual experimenter always on the lookout for adventure. Despite their deep connection, they find themselves constantly at odds — and the film’s tender yet bluntly realistic depiction of their toxic ballet was, for all the depth and humanization it afforded an authentically depicted gay couple, as trailblazing as any of the sex scenes.

This 1994 stunner is widely remembered as the film that introduced the world to Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet — pint-sized at the time, yet just as ferociously talented and skillful as they’d ever be.

Inspired by an internationally infamous real-life New Zealand crime story, “Heavenly Creatures” begins in 1952, as Juliet Hulme (Winslet), a 13-year-old English girl, transfers to a new school in Christchurch and becomes friends with lonely 14-year-old Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey, who never intended to actually land a part in the film). Juliet and Pauline develop a deep bond over their shared love of fantasy and escapism, inventing a magical realm to which they can escape together from the world’s trials. However, over time, their relationship becomes increasingly intense, codependent, and obsessive.

It’s one of the best, most perceptive movies ever made about teenage love and the earth-scorching forms it can take on — and a perfect, transitional showcase of director Peter Jackson’s gift for finding the humanity in fantasy and vice-versa.

At the turn of the 20th century, many prominent French filmmakers dabbled in boundary-pushing, taboo-breaking hardcore horror of the sort you’d never want to watch around your parents, in what would become known as the “New French Extremity.” Claire Denis, arguably the premier French filmmaker of the turn-of-the-century generation, was among the participants in that movement — and her contribution, 2001’s “Trouble Every Day,” puts almost every other New French Extremity title to shame.

Denis’ nauseating, ultra-bloody film could be described as a kind of unofficial vampire cinema reimagining — but with the craving for blood made even more gruesomely literal and raw. It tells the story of Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo), an American man on a honeymoon trip to Paris with his wife June (Tricia Vessey). Unbeknownst to June, Shane is afflicted with a bizarre, mysterious condition that renders him sexually and gluttonously obsessed with consuming human flesh. He eventually crosses paths with Coré (Béatrice Dalle), a woman with an even more extreme case of the same condition. Denis spins that setup into a disturbing yet entrancingly meaningful treatise on the nature of love and desire. If you can stomach it until the end, it’s a cinematic journey you won’t soon forget.

Arguably the most offbeat film in Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre, “Phantom Thread” nonetheless oozes Anderson’s personality — specifically, his fascination with the nooks and crannies of weird, gnarly relationships, and his love of bringing historical periods to life in a way that melds highbrow with lowbrow until one disappears into the other. Ostensibly a Merchant Ivory-esque costume drama, “Phantom Thread” is really more of a zany, goofy, riotously dark romantic comedy in (literal) prestige clothing — a movie that finds Anderson constructing his most respectably ornate dollhouse yet, and then putting on his most mischievous behavior inside it.

The (again, ostensible) star is Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, a high-end fashion designer in 1950s London whose volcanic temper and infantile obsession with routine and ritual, written off by everybody as a forgivable corollary to his genius, are carefully managed by his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville). But “Phantom Thread” is actually about Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), the waitress who charms Reynolds and becomes his lover and muse. At first, Alma accepts Reynolds’ whims and her carefully-defined place in the mechanics of the Woodcock estate. Over time, however, Alma realizes her worth and her importance to Reynolds, and the power dynamics of their relationship begin to shift in decisive, exhilarating ways, turning “Phantom Thread” into a bold study of two freaks who match each other a little too perfectly.

Most love stories in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films are twisty, tenuous, volatile ones, but the irreconcilable love triangle at the center of “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” might just take the cake. Adapted from Fassbinder’s own eponymous play, the 1972 film takes place entirely within the house of Bremen fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen), with most of the action confined to her bedroom — but it is so teeming with life and emotion that it hardly feels like a closed-quarters movie at all.

Petra lives with mute servant and fellow designer Marlene (Irm Hermann), constantly mistreating her even as Marlene tends to every detail of her routine. One day, Petra meets the youthful Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla), and, immediately smitten, offers to help her become a model. Karin moves in, and an untenable situation emerges: Marlene loves Petra. Petra loves Karin. Karin may or may not love Petra back. Channelling his own demons through the tortured, affection-starved character of Petra, Fassbinder creates a portrait of toxic love that scorches harder than most horror films.

Nowhere else in cinema history was the brooding, melancholy Humphrey Bogart noir archetype better-utilized than in Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place,” a film that makes most noir look shallow and light by comparison. Bogart’s character, Dixon Steele, is a flailing, once-successful Hollywood screenwriter who becomes a suspect in a murder case — just as he’s striking up a promising relationship with his new neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame).

The plot, adapted from the eponymous 1947 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, is full of flighty zigzagging thrills — this is one of the great murder mysteries in film history. But the real attraction is the way the film fleshes out the relationship between Dixon and Laurel, which begins with the latter helping the former out of his professional slump and encouraging him to let go of his angry, destructive old ways — and then takes a turn into dark, dangerous, psychologically exacting territory, as the question of whether Dixon can change consumes more and more of the ostensible domestic bliss.

A startlingly modern film, even by contemporary standards, 1969’s “Double Suicide” is arguably the towering masterwork authored by underrated Japanese New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda. Few other movies have ever rendered such immense and cataclysmic emotions so visually and aurally persuasive. This is an instance of pure cinematic feeling run amok, with all that entails.

The story is centered around Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura), a paper merchant in 18th-century Japan who, despite being married with children and saddling his wife Osan (Shima Iwashita) with most of his mill’s operations, has fallen hopelessly and fathomlessly in love with sought-after local courtesan Koharu (also Iwashita). Unable to buy Koharu’s freedom even after two years’ worth of vows, Jihei endeavors along with her to commit shinjÅ«, double suicide, if the world doesn’t allow them to be together. Innumerable complications ensue, turning Jihei and Koharu’s lives into a site of relentless interpersonal devastation that Shinoda depicts with unparalleled melodramatic gusto.

A taut, low-budget romp that introduced filmgoers to Lana and Lilly Wachowski with style, “Bound” is the pinnacle of “be gay, do crimes” cinema. It’s an incredible, near-unimpeachable heist film starring lesbians, yes, but most of all “Bound” just gets it. Nothing else in ’90s American film so adroitly captures the beauty, pain, and hard-won ecstasy of queer existence as a fundamental act of defiance.

Written by the siblings themselves, “Bound” stars Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as one of the most explosively well-paired couplets in erotic thriller history, their chemistry and warm authenticity shining through even the film’s hardest forays into danger and violence. The plot tells the story of a Chicago ex-con (Gershon) who gets seduced by a Mafia money launderer’s long-suffering girlfriend (Tilly), and is asked by her to take part in a plan to steal $2 million of skimmed cash. It’s all carried off with the same precision and pulpy ingenuity that the Wachowskis would continue to demonstrate in later, higher-budgeted efforts — and the sex scenes, aided by Susie Bright as an unofficial intimacy coordinator, are among the most brilliantly-shot ever in the genre.

The most fascinating thing about “The Piano” may be the fact that it was a box office smash. To be sure, it’s as dark, unsavory, and quietly radical as any other Jane Campion inquiry into the ins and outs of heterosexual courtship, featuring not one but two central relationships too thorny and harrowing to be properly described as romantic. Yey, in 1993, audiences around the world embraced it to the tune of $140 million.

It may just have something to do with Campion’s penchant for hiding her acumen in plain sight, outwardly presenting it as torrid love. If you’re not paying attention, “The Piano” looks a lot like the story of a mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) who finds solace from her suffocating arranged marriage to a New Zealand settler (Sam Neill) in the arms of a brooding retired sailor (Harvey Keitel). But a closer examination reveals the would-be unlikely romance between Ada McGrath and George Baines as just another facet in the film’s brilliant, complex exploration of how patriarchy’s trappings manifest through intimacy.

Terrence Malick is not the first guy some people think of when they think “dark, twisted romance”, but he began his feature filmmaking career by battling constant behind-the-scenes pressure to contribute a defining entry to that subgenre. Generally described as a neo-noir but just as possible to categorize as a neo-Western, 1973’s “Badlands” was one of the most galvanizing films of the New Hollywood era — a movie that took the subversive designs of Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” and pushed them even further aesthetically, politically, and psychologically.

Loosely inspired by the 1958 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and his Caril Ann Fugate, “Badlands” tells the story of sheltered 15-year-old South Dakota girl Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), who gets swept off her feet by 25-year-old garbage collector and Korean War vet Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen), and then tags along with Kit on an aimless, murder-strewn road trip after he shoots her father dead (Warren Oates). Earthy, sly, and quietly funny even as it gets gallows-dark, the film presents a vision of the midcentury United States as a kind of self-furnishing purgatory — a land where violence exists as a constant and needn’t have a point.

Wong Kar-wai has given us at least three — and quite possibly more — of the defining visions of love, lust, and romanticism in modern cinema. Compared to the likes of “In the Mood for Love” and “Chungking Express,” however, “Happy Together” stands out as the Wong film that takes the full measure of love’s wreckage as well as its bliss. It may be the best film ever made about a tempestuous romance between two people locked into mutually assured destruction — certainly, at least, the most richly expressive.

The protagonists, as in most Wong films, are both from Hong Kong, but what we see of their love story unfolds in Buenos Aires, Argentina — a bustling metropolis that Wong depicts as lovingly as any director ever has. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai play the two star-crossed boyfriends, and their work is as steeped in choreography as in conventional film acting, Wong’s camera charting their constant movement towards and away from each other as the world’s most beautiful, sorrowful dance.

What Agnès Varda does in “Le Bonheur” is one of the smartest cinematic gambits of all time: Telling what any other French (male) director of the 1960s would have probably framed as a frothy modernist comédie érotique, she emphasizes the would-be aesthetic markers of a lighthearted take on her subject, from bright colors to poppy editing to pleasantly airy music — all while sneakily constructing what essentially amounts to a horror story.

It’s hard to even imagine having much use for another adultery-themed film after seeing “Le Bonheur,” which does just about all that can be done with the tale of François (Jean-Claude Drouot), his dutiful wife Thérèse (Claire Drouot), and his burgeoning infatuation with perky post office worker Émilie (Marie-France Boyer). Ever a fan of cheeky meta-casting, Varda presents the real-life husband-and-wife protagonists as an archetypal representation of man’s sheer inhumanity to woman, flowers and picnics and all — right up to the most horrifying ending in movie history.

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” is a staggering summation of a great filmmaker’s guiding obsessions and neuroses. It’s both awe-inspiring in its showcase of Hitchcock’s fullest formal mastery, and mind-boggling in the way that it puts that mastery in service of a compulsively, addictively wrong story. It’s a thriller and not a thriller; a romance and not a romance; a confession and an obfuscation. Above all, it’s a masterpiece.

The plot follows a character not far off from Hitchcock himself: John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart), a detective afflicted with severe acrophobia, who takes on the case of an old college friend (Tom Helmore) who believes his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) may be possessed by the spirit of a dead woman in a historical painting. John begins to shadow Madeleine around San Francisco and becomes increasingly fascinated, until a perilous romance blossoms between the two of them. That romance, as it happens, is wholly unlike anything in Hitchcock’s filmography, or really any director’s: With both Stewart and Novak turning in all-timer performances, “Vertigo” burrows into the very nature of cinema as a process of lurid, obsessive fixation. It changes the way you watch movies.