The Rise of the Anti-Rom-Com: Hollywood’s New Taste for Love That Goes Wrong

The romantic-comedy formula that shepherded mismatched lovers to tidy happy endings has been supplanted, for now, by a spate of films that take pleasure in love’s failures. This season’s releases invert the genre’s customary optimism, favoring bitter humor, surreal conceits and a pointed focus on relationships that fray rather than fuse.

In one of the most literal riffs on the idea of codependency, writer-director Michael Shanks’ horror-comedy Together follows a couple who become bound to one another by a mysterious force that physically glues them together, turning domestic tensions into a macabre spectacle. The image of romance as entrapment recurs in Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville, which bills itself as “An Unromantic Comedy” and treats the concept of open marriage as a vehicle for escalating, often farcical, dysfunction. Sophie Brooks’s Oh, Hi! examines mismatched expectations from the opposite angle, satirizing women who want an intense, fast-moving connection and the men who recoil from it.

The films share a through line: they confront the ideology that love inevitably redeems. Where classic rom-coms hinge on meet-cutes and reconciliations, these works probe infidelity, resentment, boredom and the emotional labor that makes relationships fail. Tone varies — Shanks leans toward horror-tinged absurdity, Covino toward cracked slapstick, Brooks toward sharp domestic satire — but each prioritizes fracture over fantasy.

Critics and viewers have noticed the shift. A recent roundup in Time framed the trend as an “era of the anti-rom-com,” pointing to the appetite for stories that register the messier realities of modern coupling rather than glossing over them. Filmmakers are using genre elements — horror, farce, dark comedy — to examine how unmet expectations and structural pressures shape intimate life.

The anti-rom-com does not entirely abandon humor or romantic longing; instead, it reframes both as plausible responses to disappointment. Splitsville’s portrayal of an ostensibly liberated arrangement that quickly devolves into chaos turns the lighthearted premise of sexual freedom into a comedic critique of poor communication and fractured intimacy. Oh, Hi! interrogates the gendered scripts of desire, illuminating how different expectations can lead to mutual disillusionment rather than mutual fulfilment.

The trend also reflects a broader appetite for genre hybridization. By blending elements of horror, satire and farce with relationship storytelling, these films create tonal dissonance that underscores their thematic aims. Audiences accustomed to the safety net of happy endings are forced into a different posture: to laugh at the uglier sides of love and to recognize the social forces that make such ugliness familiar.

Those who follow the evolution of genre note that romantic comedy has long assimilated new cultural moods. In previous decades, the genre absorbed shifting norms about sex, work and gender; the current wave appears to be responding to skepticism about institutions and ideals that once underpinned cinematic romance. Filmmakers are less interested in reaffirming a social contract than in interrogating why that contract frays.

The anti-rom-com’s emergence does not signal the death of conventional romantic comedy. Studios and streaming platforms continue to produce films that emphasize reconciliation and optimism. But the recent slate demonstrates a parallel demand: for stories that reflect the anxieties, contradictions and often comic cruelty of contemporary relationships. As these films circulate at festivals and in theaters, they are expanding the vocabulary of romantic storytelling — not by restoring certainty, but by depicting what happens when love goes wrong.