Obsessive love: Our Valentine’s picks

Valentine’s Day still brings the usual mix of candlelit dinners and last-minute flower runs, but the conversation around love has widened. Obsessive love sits at the center of that shift, and the films that capture it keep multiplying. Some of the sharpest examples remain the older titles that already lived on this list, while a fresh batch of releases shows how the same dangerous impulse plays out in new settings.

Heavenly Creatures

The only obstacle to our star-crossed lovers in this film is delusional, psychotic tendencies that end in bludgeoning someone to death. Pauline (Melanie Lynsky) and Juliet (Kate Winslet in her film debut) make us ask “what’s a little murder between very close friends?”

Mala Noche

The first film by Drugstore Cowboy director Gus Van Sant follows Walt (Tim Streeter), a down-and-out gay store clerk who lusts after Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), a teenage Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak any English and is absolutely not having any of it. Total recipe for romance, amirite?

Bitter Moon

This Roman Polanski film mixes nautical comedy with an S&M romance. Proper British couple Nigel (Hugh Grant) and Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas) meet young Frenchwoman Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) and her wheelchair-bound American husband, Oscar (Peter Coyote). In a series of alcohol-fueled flashbacks, Oscar tells Nigel the story of his twisted and turbulent love affair with Mimi. His tale is shocking and hilarious – one that Nigel can’t help but listen to and that viewers can’t help but watch.

Audition

From this movie, we learned never to accept favors from friends. When widower Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) allows his good friend to put together an event for young women to “audition” to be Aoyama’s new wife, he immediately becomes taken with Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), a beautiful young woman who works for a music producer (lie!) and lives in a beautiful, furniture-filled (completely empty) apartment where she has wonderful parties with friends (sits creepily still by the phone for days on end, waiting for Aoyama to call, while a brown hessian sack moves slowly at her feet). You can probably guess where this is all headed. Maybe the real moral of this story is not to audition your future wife and let love naturally come.

Open Your Eyes

If you’ve seen the 2001 remake of this film, Vanilla Sky, but haven’t seen the original, take your fingers out of your pants for a second and DAFS. A real mind-trip of a film, the story of César (Eduardo Noriega), a man completely smitten with the beautiful Sophia (Penélope Cruz) but stalked and disfigured by his obsessive ex-girlfriend Nuria (Najwa Nimri), will have you doubting your sanity even as César begins to question his own.

The Neon Demon

The IMDb review for this movie ends: “Her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will take any means necessary to get what she has.” Very Showgirls, no? Rather than a campy comedy, The Neon Demon is a shocking psychological thriller starring Elle Fanning as a young woman who barely makes it out of the Hollywood modeling scene alive – or does she? Its visual style and beauty-obsession themes continue to surface in later discussions of predatory glamour.

Play Misty for Me

Dave (Clint Eastwood), a radio DJ in Carmel, California, is hanging at his local bar one night when a beautiful young woman (Jessica Walter) just happens to show up. She just happens to be a loyal fan who calls in to Dave’s radio show quite a bit to request that he play the famous jazz number “Misty.” She also just happens to have heard him mention the name of the bar. The two just happen to start a love affair and then she just happens to turn out to be a stalking, suicidal maniac. Oopsy.

The Great Gatsby

A fast-living, eccentric millionaire just happens to buy a house across the bay from the married woman he’s long been obsessed with. (Ok – I’ll stop now.)

If you’ve read the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald (or even if you haven’t), check out the 1974 film version starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as the deeply unhappy Daisy Buchanan.

For an infinitely glitzier version, check out the 2013 Baz Luhrmann remake starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. What it lacks in class, it makes up for with fireworks.

Betty Blue

This 1986 film tells the volatile love story of Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and his violent, window-breaking, house-burning, running-through-town-screaming, eye-gouging lover, Betty (Béatrice Dalle). It’s the perfect film for a night of Netflix and chill!

Three Colors White

What do you do when your wife divorces you, publicly declaring that she doesn’t love you (embarrassing) and that you couldn’t consummate your marriage (really embarrassing)? You work hard to become filthy rich in order to win her back, of course! Win her back so that you can get revenge!

Zbigniew Zamachowski and Julie Delpy star in this darkly twisted comedy. New 4K restorations of the trilogy have kept the film circulating at festivals and repertory houses in recent years.

Lolita

Films about obsessive love always make us uncomfortable, but this is really, really true when the obsession is that of a 40-year-old man for a 12-year-old nymphet. The novel by Vladimir Nabokov was alternately celebrated and banned. Never one to shy away from controversy, director Stanley Kubrick stepped up to make the film, although he later said that if he’d known it would be attacked by censors, he likely never would have made it. While director Adrian Lyne filmed a remake in 1997, you really can’t beat the original. Although the film is fabulous, we do prefer the book.

Misery

The 1990 film based on a hit Stephen King novel isn’t about obsessive love of the romantic kind, per se, but it’s love all the same. When famous author Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is injured in a car crash, he wakes up in the home of psychotic superfan Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). Um . . . break a leg, Paul!

Obsession

Released in theaters May 15, 2026, Obsession gives the theme a supernatural jolt. Directed by Curry Barker and starring Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette, the story follows a man who gains a wish-granting object and uses it to secure the affection he wants, only for the spell to twist into something far darker. The film sits comfortably alongside the older titles here because the core engine remains the same: one person’s need to possess another at any cost.

Companion

Companion (2025) takes the same impulse into science-fiction territory. Directed by Drew Hancock and starring Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid, the horror-comedy watches an artificial partner programmed for devotion and the human who grows dependent on that control. The film keeps the obsession grounded in recognizable relationship patterns while the sci-fi frame makes the power imbalance feel newly unsettling.

Fresh

Fresh (2022) has stayed on recommendation lists for obsessive-love and stalker stories since its release. Directed by Mimi Cave and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan, it tracks a woman who slowly realizes her seemingly charming date has engineered a predatory setup. Viewers often pair it with Misery when they want a more recent example of romance that turns into captivity.

Keeper

Keeper (2025) brings the theme into psychological folk horror. Directed by Osgood Perkins and starring Tatiana Maslany, the film follows a romance that retreats to a remote cabin and quickly becomes controlling and terrifying. It has been positioned alongside other obsession-driven horrors for its blend of intimate manipulation and supernatural dread.

The list keeps expanding because the impulse itself never really changes. Whether the obsession arrives through a magical object, an algorithm, a dating app, or a remote cabin, the pattern stays recognizable. These films keep mapping the same territory with new coordinates, which is why the older titles still feel current and the newer ones slot in without friction.