Singles, this one’s for you! Here’s our selection of anti-Valentine films, guaranteed to be marshmallow-free.
No red roses, no Love Actually, no syrupy playlist… This year, if you’re allergic to marshmallow, we offer you an anti-Valentine’s Day lineup for the single life: ten films about freedom, unwavering friendships, and loves that didn’t quite work out.
Fire Island
Under its appearance as a romantic comedy, Fire Island is more an honest portrait of a gay community that seeks both to party and to find groups where they can drop their social masks. Noah, a broke New Yorker, spends a week on the mythical Fire Island with his group of gay friends, oscillating between parties, crushes and deeper reflections on racism, the body, and social class. Loosely inspired by Pride and Prejudice, the film twists the romantic formula to better reveal its implicit hierarchies: who is desirable, who isn’t, and why. Fire Island has the candor to admit that love alone cannot repair inequalities, and the happy ending remains fragile. A sweet-bitter anti-Valentine’s Day that highlights the blind spots of the community.
>> Fire Island, by Andrew Ahn, streaming on Disney+
8 Women
Catherine Deneuve in full sapphic mode should be enough to convince you, but François Ozon has more than one trick up his sleeve. The staging, in the style of a musical, takes place within the walls of an isolated bourgeois house. While the patriarch of a family is murdered, the eight women in his circle become suspects in turn. Masks fall, secrets are revealed and buried desires burst forth… Behind the zippy songs and candy colors, the film is a war machine against the myth of the harmonious home. Everything that Valentine’s Day buries under red roses resurfaces here in stiletto heels. The result is jubilant and liberating. The message is simple: when the man disappears from the frame, the women stop being decorative and become dangerously interesting. Not surprising with such a cast: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Danielle Darrieux, Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine Sagnier, Firmine Richard. Simply stunning.
8 Women, by François Ozon, streaming on Mubi
The Boys in the Band
Everything unfolds at a birthday party in a New York apartment. A gang of gay friends drink, taunt, desire, and then systematically tear each other apart. The Boys in the Band, an adaptation of Mart Crowley’s cult play, is a cruel locked-room study of internalized homophobia and toxic relationships. Michael, the drunken master of ceremonies, imposes a sadistic phone-game that forces each person to call the person they truly love. The result: a collective autopsy of the couple, the desire, and the shame. A film to avoid if you’re seeking comfort. Yet it is filled with lucidity and brutality enough to shake you. Watch it when you want to remember that solo solitude can be far more violent than solitude shared with someone.
>> The Boys in the Band, by Joe Mantello, streaming on Netflix
Bottoms
Forget the overly smooth teenage romances that put you to sleep. Bottoms turns hormones into a boil and lesbian desire into the pillars of a female fight club completely over the top. PJ and Josie, two high schoolers at the threshold of kissing, desperate to hook up before the year ends (ideally with sexy cheerleaders), start a feminist self-defense club… solely for the sake of scoring, it goes without saying. The film never aims to make its heroines likable or morally exemplary. They lie, manipulate, mess up and make us wince. Emma Seligman blows up the romantic narrative by making love a battlefield in an otherwise already-violent world. A riotous comedy where romance is secondary, Bottoms is perfect for sidestepping Valentine’s Day.
>> Bottoms, by Emma Seligman, streaming on Mubi
The Widower Effect
Promised not to be a tear-jerker despite what the title suggests. Dan Levy’s first feature, The Widower Effect avoids the Netflix-therapy cliché. Marc, a grieving illustrator after his husband’s brutal death, heads to Paris with his two best friends. He isn’t there to “get better,” nor to fall in love in Paris despite the postcard backdrop. The film focuses on what remains when there is no couple, the moment when the love story collapses and leaves room for a raw solitude that the character learns to inhabit, supported by beautiful friendships.
>> The Widower Effect, by Dan Levy, streaming on Netflix
A Single Man
The same theme, but treated in a much harsher way. Beneath its ultra-polished melodrama, A Single Man portraits queer loneliness with a chilling honesty. George, a gay professor in 1962, is mourning the death of his partner, yet this suffering is coupled with the deprivation of the right to have his pain recognized. In Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel, singledom and self-imprisonment aren’t presented as choices but as consequences of erasure. Every shot is crafted as an aesthetic cage, a reflection of a world that tolerates homosexuality as long as it remains invisible. There is no consolation, no comfort here, only lucidity.
>> A Single Man, by Tom Ford, on VOD on Arte Boutique
Julie (in 12 Chapters)
A film that speaks to anyone who feels out of place, or completely behind. Your friends have kids? A suburban house and an air fryer? Thank RuPaul it isn’t the case for Julie, a Norwegian thirty-something as lost as you. She has dropped out of studies, dumped her boyfriend and wrestles with many existential questions. The thing is, try as she might, she cannot picture herself in a stable life. Joachim Trier dismantles the storytelling of romance and the injunction to be in a couple with precision, irony, and a deep melancholy.
>> Julie (in 12 Chapters), by Joachim Trier, streaming on Mubi
Tangerine
Shot on an iPhone, assembled with elbow grease and a DIY spirit, Tangerine is a jolt of pure queer energy. Two trans women, a betrayal, a night of chaos. The plot is simple: on Christmas Eve, Sin-Dee, a sex worker recently released from prison after a 28-day stretch, learns her boyfriend cheated on her during his stay behind bars. She sets off across Los Angeles to find him, joined by her best friend Alexandra. Proof that a strong friendship can be far sturdier than all the half-hearted promises of love you’ve heard.
>> Tangerine, by Sean Baker, streaming on Canal+
Frances Ha
A call to those who have decided to stop chasing a couple as social validation. Frances isn’t a single woman dreaming of big love. Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig dismantle the myth of emotional success by filming a heroine whose most intense relationship isn’t romantic but platonic. When Sophie, Frances’s best friend, moves away, the 27-year-old New Yorker is left to her own devices. Alone here is not failure; it’s a refusal of the pressure to settle into a neat, stable story. Frances Ha is a tribute to singled life, ambition, and tenacity.
>> Frances, A by Noah Baumbach, on VOD on Arte Boutique
Go Fish
No need for introductions; this independent lesbian film is one of the cornerstones of lesbian culture. Made by Rose Troche, it depicts 1990s Chicago. Max, a butch with a cap, looks for a girl while her group of queer friends buckles down to pair her with Ely, a hippie they consider the rare gem. The film unfolds like a community house where everyone moves around: exes, rumors, judgments, expectations tied to butch and femme identities, and the nagging question: “Am I a good enough lesbian?” Filmed on a shoestring with friends as actors and in black and white, Go Fish captures a time when the lesbian community was both refuge, tribunal, and laboratory for love experiments. Perfect for reframing our own squabbles and heartbreaks.
>> Go Fish, by Rose Troche, streaming on Mubi
