Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is one of the sweetest, most magical love stories ever told. Set on the picturesque Yorkshire Moors, it’s a cosy romance about a pair of plucky young kids, Cathy and Heathcliff, who grow up to become lovers (and ghosts!), along the way navigating family pressures, nosy neighbours and some rather mischievous animals. Heathcliff loves Cathy so much that he even digs up her grave – more men like this, please! 👏

But not every on-screen romance is as wholesome as Wuthering Heights and, sadly, not all men are gallant, unproblematic kings like Heathcliff. If you’re in the mood for something a little edgier this Valentine’s Day, we’ve got you covered. To celebrate the release of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation, below you’ll find a list of cinema and television’s most toxic, messed-up and outright crazzzy relationships. But be warned: unlike Brontë’s heartwarming classic, some of these tales don’t come with a happy ending…

LOVES LIES BLEEDING

It’s hard for a film amped up on adrenaline and shot mostly in a grungy gym not to involve something toxic. In Love Lies Bleeding, it’s the crash-course romance between Lou (Kristen Stewart), a reclusive gym manager in New Mexico, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a driven bodybuilder passing through town at the centre of that chaos. Their relationship is fuelled by one intense rush – steroids shot into biceps, dumps of dopamine, and a whole lot of destruction.

Ultimately, the story ends tragically, framing their bond as a dark, queer “anti-love story” where the thrill of a stable, comfortable relationship isn’t quite enough to keep them going. Despite its obvious toxicity, it’s not so horrible to see a sapphic romance that isn’t all yearning and homesteading – a warning that lesbians can be just as dangerously “crazy” as anyone else. (T)

SECRETARY 

Secretary is the tale of an unlikely romance that only makes sense to the two people inside it. Inspired by a short story from Mary Gaitskill’s indelible collection of dark vignettes, Bad Behaviour, the film stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lee, a nervous young woman who’s trying to assimilate into adult life after rehab for her self-harm addiction. When she gets hired as a legal secretary to uptight Mr Grey (played with panache by James Spader), the pair begin tentatively exploring their latent submissive and dominant tendencies in increasingly extreme and imaginative ways around the office. 

Is this a toxic relationship? Or is it an unconventional love story about two damaged people who, by relinquishing their struggles for normalcy, find an unusual kind of symbiotic happiness? Secretary is the perfect counterpart to some of the other titles on this list, and I think it adds an interesting dimension to a conversation about what’s deemed healthy. (ED)

 GONE GIRL

Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) are about as toxic as it gets in David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name. Amy is the ultimate unreliable narrator, but one thing we know for sure is that Nick has cheated on her – and with a young Emily Ratajkowski no less. Amy gets her own back in spectacular style – only to change her mind when things go wrong.

Gone Girl offers a bleak vision of suburban married life, but I’ve always found its ending oddly romantic (in large part because the score, by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, is so transcendent). During one of their final confrontations, when Nick insists that all they ever did was resent each other, try to control each other and cause each other pain, Amy replies, “That’s marriage.” For all her evil scheming, I think there's something quite sweet about her determination to put the past behind them and give their relationship another go. Gone Girl is about the impossibility of truly knowing another person (the film both opens and ends with Nick’s internal monologue as he stares into Amy’s eyes: “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you?”); that unknowability can be terrifying, but wouldn’t it be boring if it weren’t the case? (JG)

PHANTOM THREAD

Reynolds Woodcock, the haute couture tailor played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, would not be an easy man to live with. He is obsessive and domineering, haunted by his dead mother, and responds to a surprise dinner from Alma, his muse-turned-wife, by asking her: “Are you a special agent sent here to ruin my evening and possibly my entire life?” But to be fair, Alma sometimes chews very loudly, which is also quite annoying!

The problem with their toxic relationship, which is the heart of Phantom Thread, is that they really seem to need each other, despite – or because of – their irreconcilable differences. In the end, things take a literally toxic turn when (spoiler alert) Alma gives Woodcock a reprieve from his life of stifling dinners and ballgown deadlines with the help of some poisonous mushrooms. This makes it not only one of the most poisonous romances in cinema, but one of the most romantic poisonings as well. (TW)

THE LIVING END

Gregg Araki’s 1992 New Queer Cinema classic shows that gay couples can be just as toxic as their straight counterparts (representation matters!) It’s basically a classic Bonnie and Clyde story about two lovers on the lam, but with a twist. Both Jon (Craig Gilmore) and Luke (Mike Dytri) are HIV-positive – back before the invention of effective treatment, when the virus was still effectively a death sentence – which means they really have nothing to lose. Instead of meekly accepting their fate, the pair embrace liberating nihilism, unbridled fury and condomless sex, rejecting the demand that people with Aids should be perfect and passive victims. 

There’s nothing toxic about that, but Luke is violent and unpredictable, and the film’s chaotic romanticism is undercut by a bleak final scene. The Living End is ugly and exhilarating, an antidote to the blander, more sanitised depictions of gay romance which have gained popularity in recent years. (JG)

OLD BOY

Old Boy is about a man, Oh Dae-su, who is kidnapped by unknown assailants, locked in a room for 15 years and released without explanation, upon which he embarks on a bloody campaign of retribution and, along the way, enters into a relationship with a beautiful young woman. But what follows is one of cinema’s most disturbing twists. We hesitated on whether to include Old Boy on this list – it’s not exactly 500 Days of Summer – but it doesn’t get more toxic than this. (JG)

SEX AND THE CITY

Carrie and Big are my favourite heterosexual couple. I love them for all the reasons people hate them. For example: when Big was moving to Paris, Carrie thought she was moving with him and walked around NY with a Maccies in hand, in a beret, only to learn that he didn’t want her to uproot her life and “expect” anything from him (meaning a relationship). Big was absolutely horrible in this situation, but people use this as an example of Carrie being embarrassing because she reveals that she loves him more than he loves her. And as internet feminists tell us all the time, this is a crime.

I love how much Carrie loves Big, how crazy he makes her, and how crazy she makes him. I still think about the way they first met in episode one, when he helps her pick up the items that fell out of her bag on the street, and the big dumb grin he gives her as he hands over her condoms. I am swooning just thinking about it. I do believe that love can make you crazy, and those two are the craziest chicas of them all! (HJ)

SCANDAL

While Bridgerton may currently be the yearning community’s romance of choice, real Shonda Rhimes heads know that Scandal, the seven-season soapy political drama, is the hitmaking showmaker’s magnum opus. The series, set in the moral cesspool that is Washington DC, follows a girl-bossy PR crisis manager (played by Kerry Washington) who ends up in an affair with the president of the United States after working on his campaign. Needless to say, it’s all very messy; what could be more toxic than mixing foreign affairs with personal ones? 

Still, Olivia Pope, Washington’s character, and President Fitz, played by Tony Goldwyn, are a pair that’s impossible to look away from. Washington and Goldwyn’s on-screen chemistry is unmatched, and their off-screen chemistry (documented by countless interviews where the co-stars sing each other’s praises) only adds to the show’s allure. While infidelity is ‘bad’, it’s hard to deny that #Olitz is a couple worth rooting for. (IB)

THE GRADUATE 

The Graduate follows Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a spiritless 21-year-old intent on spending his post-college days languishing in his parents’ swimming pool. Ben is palpably depressed – until he begins an affair with his parents’ friend Mrs Robinson, which appears to inject some excitement into his life. But things get more complicated when Ben develops feelings for Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine.

Mrs Robinson threatens to reveal the affair – but Ben beats her to it and confesses to Elaine, prompting her to end their relationship and retreat back to Berkeley. There, she begins a relationship with a medical student and is pressured into marrying him by her parents, only for Ben to burst into the ceremony, screaming “Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!”. She runs to him and the pair flee, flagging down a passing bus and bundling into the back, plainly exhilarated – but their giddy smiles soon melt away to more apathetic, uncertain expressions. Are the pair truly in love, or motivated by a desire to spite Mrs Robinson? Or are they just young, rash, and stupid? And Elaine – I can’t help but think that there are men out there who haven’t shagged your mum… but the heart wants what it wants! (SS)

THE PIANO TEACHER

This starts kind of promisingly: a sexually repressed woman called Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is working as a highly respected piano teacher in Vienna, when she meets a handsome young student called Walter. Walter quickly becomes fascinated with Erika and attempts to seduce her. Could this be the beginning of a great love story, or a powerful sexual reawakening? Spoiler alert: no! What follows are some of the most disturbing scenes ever committed to film.

It turns out Erika, although stoic and repressed, has a whole world of sexual fantasies simmering beneath her glacial surface – and many of them are profoundly twisted and perverse. Let’s just say that Walter isn’t very open-minded or receptive to her proposals. Isabelle Huppert is unreal in this film, but I hope to never see it again, for as long as I live. (DS)