Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind & 9 Other Essential Breakup Movies
As ABBA once said, breaking up is never easy. Even mutual breakups are hard to get over. After a breakup, people know they’ll be fine eventually, but “eventually” doesn’t help them now. And, really, there’s no quick fix. There’s a lot of difficult emotions to get through after a breakup. The only thing that can heal that wound is time.
But watching movies that address the pain of ending a relationship can help people face those emotions. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the ultimate breakup movie, for obvious reasons, but there are a handful of essential movies about breakups.
10 Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)
Inspired by a friend’s art project — sending letters to people informing them that they’ve been removed from an acquaintance’s memories — Michael Gondry concocted the basic premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play a pair of oddballs who fall in love, fall out of love, and break up. When the former hires an experimental company to remove the latter from his memories to escape the pain of the breakup, the treatment goes wrong and he gets lost in his own mind.
What makes this the quintessential breakup movie is that it visualizes the emotions and memories attached to a relationship after it’s over in a profound, relatable way.
9 High Fidelity (2000)
Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity stars John Cusack as Rob, a 30-year-old record store owner who keeps getting dumped and begins to suspect that maybe he’s the problem.
This is a common insecurity following breakups, and Rob’s quest to improve himself is inspirational. High Fidelity is a breakup movie for a freshly broken heart.
8 Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Jason Segel wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of the best romcoms of the 2000s, as a vehicle for himself to star in. He plays Peter, a TV composer whose famous girlfriend (Kristen Bell) leaves him for a British rocker (Russell Brand). Encouraged to go on a vacation to clear his head, Peter travels down to Hawaii, only to find that his ex and her new boyfriend are staying at the same resort.
With a supporting cast full of comedy royalty (Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd) and a well-structured plot with plenty of breathing room for improvisation, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is in the same league as Knocked Up and Superbad at the peak of the Judd Apatow era.
7 Blue Valentine (2010)
Not only will Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine get somebody over a breakup; its portrayal of relationships is so decidedly unromantic, it might put them off dating for the rest of their life.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as a couple who only realize their relationship won’t last after having a daughter together.
6 When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Although When Harry Met Sally is more of a love story about its title characters realizing they’re perfect for each other, they each have to go through an agonizing breakup to get there. Reeling from their respective breakups is what brings them closer together in the movie’s second act.
Thanks to Rob Reiner’s razor-sharp direction, Nora Ephron’s beautifully crafted script full of relatable vignettes and spot-on comic bits, and Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal’s electric on-screen chemistry, When Harry Met Sally is one of the definitive cinematic statements about relationships in general — and the anguish of breakups is rolled in there.
5 Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence make for a dynamic on-screen pairing in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. At the beginning of the movie, Cooper’s character Pat is recovering from a mental breakdown after losing his job and his wife in one fell swoop.
He falls for Lawrence’s character Tiffany, who introduces him to dance. Silver Linings Playbook is a much more complex take on the well-worn story of a guy going through a breakup and then finding new love.
4 Brokeback Mountain (2005)
The tragedy of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is that its central couple can’t be together because society won’t accept them. Jack and Ennis enjoy a brief, passionate affair before settling into unhappy marriages and occasionally meeting up on discreet fishing trips.
On one of these trips, Ennis tells Jack they can’t meet up again, leading to an emotionally charged argument and eventually a heartfelt embrace. Later, Ennis sends Jack a postcard that’s returned to him with a “deceased” stamp.
3 Marriage Story (2019)
Noah Baumbach depressed audiences everywhere with the documentary-like realism of this deep dive into the ugly side of love. As Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson fall out of love and slip into increasingly hostile divorce proceedings battling over custody of their son, the claws come out and their darkest feelings about each other rear their heads.
Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, and especially Laura Dern, who won a much-deserved Oscar for her turn in the film, all provide fascinating foils for Driver and Johansson as their divorce attorneys.
2 Midsommar (2019)
When Ari Aster was hired to write and direct a slasher set in Sweden, he happened to be going through a breakup, so he channeled the emotions of the breakup into the surreal terror of the movie.
At the beginning of Midsommar, Dani and Christian are right on the verge of splitting up. Then, a personal tragedy strikes Dani, and Christian is forced to take her with him on a trip to a Swedish death cult’s drug-fueled once-every-90-years festival, where they each get a lot more than they bargained for.
1 The Souvenir (2019)
Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir is a strikingly human portrait of a toxic relationship. Honor Swinton Byrne stars as Julie, a film student, who falls for Anthony, a Foreign Office employee played by Tom Burke, and at first, it seems like a fairy tale romance. However, the honeymoon phase comes to an abrupt end when Julie discovers Anthony has been hiding an addiction to heroin from her.
He constantly gaslights and manipulates her, he shamelessly steals from her for quick cash, he lets random junkies into her apartment, he uses his government job as an excuse to lie and keep secrets from her, he gives her an illness through his drug habit — but it’s still difficult for her to let go, because she’s human.
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