5 Movies To Watch For An Anti-Valentines Day
Sometimes love isn’t enough.
Written by Samwel Rasheed Tan.
February 7, 2023
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine.” Image credit to Weinstein Company.
Valentine's Day movie recommendations are often formulaic and monotonous. They often only have the same elements: a meet-cute, snarky confrontations, developed feelings, misunderstanding, reconciliation, and a confession, a formula that is used time and time again. This culminates in the same type of movie experience come the day of love.
Fortunately, that doesn't have to be the case all the time. You can choose to challenge it and have an anti-Valentines day movie experience instead. Here are five anti-Valentines movies to watch because love isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it's rough, not enough, or it just plainly sucks.
La La Land
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in “La La Land”. Image credit to Lionsgate LLC.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play star-crossed lovers in the city of angels. Damien Chazelle presents a film of Old Hollywood that feels like a fever dream, as every frame is made to look like a painting in the Louvre.
La La Land is a love letter to dreamers and artists alike. A modern musical for the ages that hits all the cylinders treading the line between romanticism and impending heartbreak, along with the seamless transition from being a love story to being a story about love. La La Land is an anti-Valentines film that will make you gleeful about the beauty of having relationships before leaving you to tears as you reminisce about what could have been.
Blue Valentine
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine.” Image credit to Everett Collection.
There is little room for romantic triumph when it comes to Ryan Gosling's characters it seems. In this entry, he joins Michelle Williams as Dean and Cindy in Derek Clianfrance's tale of a love that has run its course and the toll it has taken from each.
Sweet and endearing courtship scenes being met with the bleakness of a marriage in the rocks, Blue Valentine creates a perfect take on the joys of winning and the misery of losing in this battlefield we call love. If you have a partner, you might want to watch this one at your own risk.
The Worst Person In The World
Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie in “The Worst Person in the World”. Image credit to Verdens Verste Menneske.
Renate Reinsve is a tour de force as Julie in this Norwegian picture about a woman trying to find her purpose in both her career and love life. It is a story that has been done before but what makes it different is that Julie is a reflection of the modern young adult, struggling to connect in an ever-so-connected world while bearing the looming pressure of the passing of time in the search for meaning. We follow her as she makes both good and bad decisions trying to be the best person she can be despite feeling that she is the “worst person in the world” for doing so.
The Worst Person In The World is more of an adult coming-of-age character study than it is a romance film—where the transition is toward the realization of the value of learning to love yourself, even with the risk of losing precious others.
Decision To Leave
Tang Wei and Hae Il Park in Park Chan Wook’s “Decision to Leave”. Image credit to Madman.
Love is a good thing, right? This is what Park Chan-wook asks as he delivers a twisted love story with doom written all over it from the start. Decision To Leave is about a seasoned insomniac detective attempting to uncover a homicide while slowly becoming more and more attracted to the lead suspect, the wife of the victim.
A portrayal of a romance that should never be, Decision To Leave puts its characters under a microscope, challenging them on how far they are willing to go in the name of love.
Perfect Blue
Still from Satoshi Kon’s “Perfect Blue”. Image credit to GKIDS.
Satoshi Kon’s magnum opus about the crumbling psyche of Mima Kirigoe is a perfect anti-Valentines flick that will make you glad for being single. Balancing between reality and fantasy, Kon frames the movie in such a way that he kidnaps the viewer, breaking the fourth wall—seemingly making them complicit in the abuse of Mima all throughout in what can only be described as a masterstroke in filmmaking.
A film that was ahead of its time. Perfect Blue delivers a look at the ugliness of the digital age 23 years early. The perversion of celebrities, exploitation of public figures, the illusion of what’s genuine and fabricated—all interwoven in a narrative that never fails to leave its viewers to question “what did I just watch?" for days to come. The spirit of anti-Valentines is alive here because Mima is loved, just not the way she wants.