A spate of recent films has shifted romantic comedy toward darker, more satirical territory, trading meet-cutes and guaranteed reconciliations for stories that dwell on infidelity, mutual loathing and the dull erosions of long-term relationships.
Filmmakers are foregrounding couples at their most combustible, often turning the mechanics of romance into tools for horror, slapstick and black comedy. Michael Shanks’ horror-comedy Together follows a co-dependent couple who become mysteriously stuck together; Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville bills itself as “An Unromantic Comedy” and treats open marriage as the premise for physical and comic chaos; Sophie Brooks’ Oh, Hi! skewers the social anxieties that follow when women express desire intensely and quickly. The shift has prompted critics and audiences to call this moment an era of the anti-rom-com.
The emergence of these films reflects a long-running ambivalence about romantic fantasy. As the J. Geils Band put it in 1980, “Love stinks,” and the new crop of titles literalizes that sentiment by interrogating the compromises and cruelties that romantic comedies have traditionally smoothed over. Rather than repairing relationships with contrived misunderstandings and last-minute grand gestures, the anti-rom-com places rupture, resentment and farce at the center of its dramatic engine.
Splitsville, written and directed by Covino, reframes marital arrangements and sexual politics as a kind of cracked slapstick, using physical comedy to explore emotional detachment and the ways couples negotiate desire. Together uses genre friction, blending horror and comedy, to locate a supernatural pressure point — a force that binds two people physically and, by extension, magnifies the pathological ways they rely on each other. Oh, Hi! approaches the genre from a social-psychology angle, turning the anxieties of dating and expectation into a comic study of mismatched appetites.
These films are notable less for a single unifying aesthetic than for a shared willingness to let characters’ worst impulses drive the plot. Infidelity, free-floating resentment and prolonged boredom — elements that in many romantic comedies are treated as temporary obstacles to a final embrace — become structural concerns. Directors use genre hybridity to make the emotional stakes feel both heightened and absurd: body horror, slapstick routines and satirical dialogue work in concert to undermine the conventions of reconciliation.
The trend is not a wholesale rejection of romantic storytelling. Instead, it recasts desire as unpredictable and often antagonistic, and it questions whether cinematic optimism about love can accommodate the lived messiness couples report. Filmmakers working in this vein often aim for a register that is at once funny and discomforting, prompting viewers to laugh at behavior that, in more sentimental films, would be softened or excused.
Industry observers say the rise of anti-rom-coms is part of a broader appetite for stories that interrogate contemporary intimacy rather than idealize it. Streaming platforms and independent distributors have expanded the range of mid-budget films that can find audiences, enabling directors to experiment with tone and subject matter. At the same time, cultural conversations about gender, consent and power in relationships have shifted the terms of romantic storytelling, encouraging narratives that probe how desire, control and disappointment operate in everyday life.
The anti-rom-com’s prominence this season suggests filmmakers and audiences are less interested in returning to older genre formulas than in seeing romantic comedy used to diagnose contemporary relational pain. Whether these films will recalibrate mainstream expectations for the genre remains to be seen, but their immediate effect is clear: they insist that the stories of modern lovers can be as jagged, dark and funny as the lives many people actually lead.