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MeIt’s a long-standing romcom trope in which the couples we’re meant to root for often hide lies that threaten the chances of any happy relationship blossoming. From classics like The Shop Around the Corner for today’s blockbusters like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the genre thrives every time it shows the audience the dangerous red flags it hides from its people, raising the stakes to see if the lights can still fly when the hidden purpose behind every meeting-beautiful is hidden in plain sight.
In the romantic dramas we’ve seen so far this year, the genre has not only been revived but pushed to the extreme, establishing a new type of romcom: the unlucky-in-love sociopath. This week’s new release Finding Emily is the most famous example to date, introducing psychology student Emily (Angourie Rice), whose quest to find the perfect subject for her self-destructive love story leads her to hatch a machiavellian plot to draw university student Owen (Spike Fearn stalker) as a bystander.
Owen is a charity worker at his university tutoring school. After seeing him planting posters around the school, Rice’s Emily decides to help him as a fuel for the education he should have given earlier, writing his signature on the acceptance papers, secretly recording their entire conversation, and insisting that he make big hands in public that take bad pictures of him. With this being a romantic comedy, other tropes must be followed and the feelings slowly build between the two, but the first lie has cast a shadow so destructive on Owen’s life that it does not feel a victory for the audience when they realize that it was more than a friend who betrayed him.
Last month, the audience was welcomed to another romcom in Anna Montgomery of Halle Bailey, the heroine of You, Me & Tuscany. A housekeeper who lives vicariously through her clients and considers their lives her own, we’re told, is being fired after she’s caught wearing clothes that don’t belong to her – which yes, includes underwear. After a one-night stand with a handsome Italian man, she saves photos of his beautiful Tuscan home and flies to Europe to spend the night there, proving her presence to his family by pretending to be her new boyfriend. It is a red flag after a red flag in an irreversible plan to live a luxurious life at someone else’s expense, and that he wins a new interest during this fraud is no more surprising than the Italian family that forgave him because they found him beautiful.
This form of friendship built on a lie was deliberately weaponized in Kristoffer Borgli’s. hit the black drama of Dramawhich features one white lie – Charlie (Robert Pattinson) pretending to read a book he sees Emma (Zendaya) reading to talk to her – and his decision to hide from her the worst thing he’s ever done. The Comedian not only argues that Emma is less than the people who judge her for planning a crime she didn’t commit, but it reveals why modern romantic comedies are taking their interests to such extremes. These are characters who might have moved on from each other if they hadn’t met in the real world due to the lack of shared interests at the same time, Charlie’s wedding speech that really went awry about who his future wife would be. Our lives are online more than ever, but the genre can’t seem to keep any tension at bay, meaning filmmakers are taking extreme measures to hide the red flags from every character that inspires young minds when it comes to dating.
The idea of dating is gaining momentum in a world where many relationships are starting online, and many reports point to gen Z exiting the dating market. The revival of romcoms about millennials and gen-Z audiences coincides with the need to reflect the sea change in how young people approach relationships, which is why we’re starting to see more stories that feel more like cautionary tales than traditional examples of the genre. We are still a world away from the terrible video interference of a beautiful meeting like the new thriller, where Daisy Edgar-Jones unknowingly locked eyes with Sebastian Stan cannibals in a store, but filmmakers of all kinds seem to be well aware that the digital world offers barriers to such terrible magic. There’s also nothing that won’t work if you get to know someone first and stop them before any attacks happen.
There are, of course, many horror stories about online dating that need to be told; there’s a small industry of true crime documentaries like The Tinder Swindler that love the horrors that can happen to you if you swipe right. Today’s romcom remains offline in comparison, mostly because the love it has to offer wouldn’t stand out in the mainstream of a dating app. In a world where many people pollinate culture posts about dating and young people to describe their real “icks” in loved ones, many of the new crop of romcom families could not continue to discuss Bumble if they have a good handle on each other’s personality. With young people questioning romance and romcoms struggling to justify online dating, these aren’t the last movies that are more disturbing than emotional.
