It has long been a staple of romantic comedies that the couples audiences root for often harbor lies threatening any chance of a happy relationship. From classics such as The Shop Around the Corner to modern hits like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the genre thrives on presenting alarming red flags hidden from characters, raising stakes by testing whether sparks can fly despite ulterior motives behind every meet-cute.
In romantic comedies released this year, this trope has not only been revived but pushed to extremes, cementing a new archetype: the unlucky-in-love sociopath. This week's release Finding Emily is the starkest example. It introduces psychology student Emily (Angourie Rice), whose desperation for a dissertation case study on love's self-destructive nature leads her to concoct a Machiavellian scheme to paint university student Owen (Spike Fearn) as an obsessive stalker.
Owen is a kind-hearted employee at the student union bar, meeting Emily only after his search for a different Emily he danced with leads him astray. After seeing him post campus posters, Emily decides to help him as fuel for overdue coursework, faking his signature on consent forms, secretly recording conversations, and insisting on grand public gestures that paint him negatively. As a romantic comedy, feelings gradually form between them, but the initial lie casts such a destructive shadow over Owen's life that the audience finds no triumph when he learns the truth.
The Rise of the Romcom Sociopath
Last month, audiences saw another romcom sociopath in Halle Bailey's Anna Montgomery, heroine of You, Me & Tuscany. A house-sitter who lives vicariously through clients, she is fired after wearing their clothes, including underwear. After a one-night stand with an Italian man, she saves photos of his Tuscan villa and flies to Europe to squat there, pretending to be his fiancée. Her scheme is rife with red flags, yet she wins over another love interest, and the Italian family forgives her because they find her charming.
This trope of a relationship built on lies was deliberately weaponized in Kristoffer Borgli's black comedy The Drama, which contrasts a white lie—Charlie (Robert Pattinson) pretending to have read a book Emma (Zendaya) is reading—with her concealment of a past crime she never committed. The film's genius lies in exposing why modern romcoms make love interests more extreme. These characters likely would have swiped left on each other in an online dating context due to lack of shared interests, with Charlie's wedding speech lacking specificity about his wife-to-be. As lives become more online, the genre cannot reflect that without losing dramatic tension, so filmmakers take extreme approaches to concealing red flags, reinforcing younger audiences' attitudes toward dating.
Online Dating's Impact on the Genre
The concept of a real-life meet-cute is increasingly alien in a world where more relationships begin online, and reports indicate Gen Z is opting out of dating altogether. The revival of romcoms aimed at millennial and Gen Z audiences coincides with a need to reflect this shift, leading to stories that feel more like cautionary tales than traditional examples. While not yet reaching the horror subversion of Fresh, where Daisy Edgar-Jones unwittingly meets cannibal Sebastian Stan, filmmakers in both genres seem aware that digital platforms provide barriers to dating nightmares. Neither genre functions as well if characters get to know each other first and block them before any carnage.
Horror stories about online dating abound, with true crime documentaries like The Tinder Swindler reveling in potential horrors. The modern romcom remains stubbornly offline, largely because its love interests wouldn't fare well in a dating app bio. In a world where viral social posts outline specific “icks,” most new romcom couples wouldn't sustain a Bumble conversation if they knew each other's personalities. With younger people cynical about love and romcoms struggling to justify classic tropes in an online-driven dating world, these films are unlikely to be the last in a wave that feels more harrowing than idealistic.
