“I want to say this thing about her laugh. You know how it’s… very cute, but it’s also kind of… repulsive, even?”
It’s not the kind of thing one expects to hear from a groom drafting his wedding toast. But that’s where Robert Pattinson, as Charlie Thompson, finds himself in The Drama.
The first few scenes establish that there is affection, discomfort and startling honesty between him and his fiancée Emma Harwood (Zendaya). The question is which of the two, affection or discomfort, will win; and how the honesty will play into it all.
Elsewhere, Season 2 of the series Beef sits at a similar cynical intersection of love and disquietude, weaving together the stories of a midlife marriage in decay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, in incredible turns) and a younger couple’s toxic ascent.
In the small-budget horror hit Obsession, a young man’s wish for big, unbreakable love from his friend spirals into terrifying scenarios.
These releases, all from this year, are tales of love and romance that look suspiciously like romcoms, but feel nothing like them. They’re being labelled the anti-romcoms of our age.
More or less every age has had its version, over the past century or so. The term anti-romantic comedy, in fact, dates to 1894 and George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man.
The formula doesn’t change very much: boy meets girl, sparks fly, a string of charming dates ensues and obstacles test their bond. Then, just when happily-ever-after seems within reach, the idea that love conquers all fizzles away.
In The Drama, a secret from Emma’s past surfaces as wedding arrangements begin, and her fiancé’s inability to face the truth pushes their relationship towards chaos. In the 2025 film Splitsville, a troubled marriage and an open marriage cross paths, with chaotic and troubling consequences.
It’s no surprise that even the comedies have grown more anxious and uneasy, says HT Wknd columnist and dating and relationship coach Simran Mangharam. “We’ve been living out battles of different kinds since the pandemic began, in a spell that has lasted the better part of a decade now.”
This is a generation navigating new challenges in relationships too. Once-niche formulations have entered the mainstream. There is a greater sense of self, and a sense of urgency about the passage of time, colliding with the stubbornly intact desire for realistic connection.
The anti-romcom fits seamlessly into this world.
LOVE, ACTUALLY?
Interestingly, the traditional romantic comedy, on film, was also born in uncertain times.
In the wild and witty screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, stories of sparring lovers with fast-paced, absurd humour offered people an escape from the realities of the Great Depression and a horrific world war.
Then came the early subversive versions of the 1960s and ’70s, fuelled by the women’s liberation movement and a shift towards cinema verité. Think of Woody Allen’s classic Annie Hall (1977), which broke conventions to look at the messier, grittier sides of love and dating, using unscripted scenes and the breaking of the fourth wall to underline the immediacy of the tale.
“Today’s versions certainly seem to constitute a resurgence of that radical romcom, while embracing the 21st-century trend of genre hybridity by incorporating elements of fantasy and horror too,” says Maria San Filippo, professor of film, television and media arts at Emerson College, Boston, and editor of the collection of essays After ‘Happily Ever After’: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age (2021).
It helps that streaming platforms are actively seeking out stories with an edge that draw on familiar tropes in ways that reinvent them. That’s one upside of the oversaturation of platforms and content, San Filippo says. “The deeply flawed, often-unlikeable characters of postmillennial TV dramedies such as Girls (2012-17) and Fleabag (2016-19) have primed audiences for this wave of anti-romcoms too.”
There is a very real need for a generation shaped by new labels, new identities and new ways of being to see depictions of love that reflect those shifts, Mangharam points out.
The anti-romcom, then, is less rebellion and more evidence of how ideas of romance twist and adapt over time. What has the romcom ever been, after all, but a way to make sense of the push and pull between anxiety and desire?
