Strange and nasty love: films about power games, role reversal... and mush

(My Economic Times column – about a few good films I watched recently, and the possibly whimsical links I saw between them. As you can see from the image below, they added an octopussy element to my columnist picture, which I’m pleased about)
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Enjoy romantic films? Here are a few that I watched, and liked a great deal, in the past month. There is the recently released Send Help, a gory survival thriller-cum-black comedy wherein the lines “I’m sorry I gouged your eyes out” and “I’m sorry I stabbed you” are immediately followed by “God, I love you”. Then there’s the 2022 two-hander Sanctuary, about a psychological tug-of-war between a corporate heir and the woman he hires for role-playing sexual games – with the pre-written script getting out of control. And finally, the Zendaya-Robert Pattinson-starrer The Drama, in which a man learns something about his bride-to-be that causes panic attacks, near-infidelity, and cringe-inducing wedding toasts.

And no, I’m not joking about these being romantic films; it’s possible to view them as intense love stories (or intense love-hate stories, which may be the same thing). In fact, two of them (I won’t reveal which two) end on a mushy note where we see that the twisted journey may have been essential to the consolidation of a relationship, bringing it to a point of emotional maturity and calm. (Or to a point where the people involved just throw their hands up and say, “Heck, we’re both so messed up, we may as well stay together for eternity.”) Those journeys are a lot of fun, for us viewers anyway, even if you have mixed feelings about how it all ends.

Nor am I saying these films are similar in some overriding sense – maybe it was because I watched them close to each other that I saw these links. While all of them are dark, unpredictable, even deranged (to varying degrees), there are differences based on genre and situation. For instance, Send Help – directed by horror expert Sam Raimi – contains the most explicit violence (physical and psychological) between its protagonists, a social misfit and her cocky young boss who are stranded on an island after a plane crash. In contrast, the unsettling elements in The Drama are mostly confined to brief nightmare scenes; in their real-world interactions, the lovebirds continue to be polite and considerate even after tension has crept into their relationship.

The similarities can be telling, though. Both Sanctuary and Send Help centre on a man and a woman playing power games, taking turns being in control – with the man, in each case, being the scion of a rich family and the woman someone who appears subservient to him… until she is not. Traditional gender roles are reversed: I brought home the bacon, quips the Rachel McAdams character in Send Help, after killing a boar for dinner; in Sanctuary, Margaret Qualley’s Rebecca goes from being a glorified sex worker to demanding a large stake in a company.

Compared to these films, another one I recently watched – the 2024 production Paradise, starring the talented Darshana Rajendran and Roshan Mathew as a couple who get into trouble while vacationing in Sri Lanka – is strait-laced in its depiction of people under stress. But again, there is a sense of a woman – subdued and quiet early on – coming into her own, and the overturning of conventional roles. Here, this is done through the subverting of mythological templates, with some (perhaps overdone) Ramayana commentary – the Darshana character responds to an earnest Lankan tour guide by mentioning that there are hundreds of versions of the epic, many with significant variants.

But now, since my editor is looking at me askance, I should mention that if the above films are not lovey-dovey enough for your tastes, consider a couple of other recent releases, sweeter and friendlier in tone. Both involve inter-species love: in The Sheep Detectives, shepherd Hugh Jackman looks after his flock with such devotion – even reading them detective novels – that they set out to solve the mystery of his death; and in Remarkably Bright Creatures, Sally Field, still wonderful at age eighty, plays an aquarium cleaner who bonds with a wise, sometimes pedantic old octopus.

All this has been a way of saying: broaden your definition of “love story” and you’ll have many more good films to choose from. You might also have fun locating other connections between them. A hint to get you started: Send Help has an octopus too, but one that’s used to create a paralysing toxin. Nothing mushy about that scene.