Cancel Cupid Culture!: Valentines for Losers
- Alisha
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
This slightly delayed Valentine’s edition is for the hopeless and hopeful romantics alike: our Film and TV writer, Alisha, picks a few screen gems where love is complicated, endings are uncertain, and chocolates are optional.
The season of love can come around, but not everyone will be spending time with someone they love. Some reject the very notion of love, others long for it but are lost, and many remain stuck in a limbo where love is less an answer than a question that keeps being rewritten in their books.
Love on screen is often depicted as a fairytale: meet, fall, forever. However, sometimes a few quietly tell a different story. With or without a Valentine, here are a few recommendations of films and TV shows that capture the confusion and despair of all the romance in the air.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?
The film follows Joel Barish as he discovers that his girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski, has undergone a procedure to erase him from her memory following their breakup. After deciding to do the same, Joel is faced with the real price of running away from pain.
As Joel’s memory deletion process unfolds through the night, he realises that erasing all of Clementine means losing not only the imperfections of the relationship, but also the joyous memories he longs to remember. Thus, through his attempt at undoing the procedure from within his own mind, the film explores the internal struggles of coming to terms with a relationship’s end: it isn’t solely about letting go of the person you once loved, it’s also about reanalysing the shared experiences that have ultimately shaped who you are in the present moment.
The non-chronological, circular storytelling creates a fragmented disorientation for the audience, mirroring the protagonist’s own confusion and biased recollections of Clementine. Thus, Eternal Sunshine argues that love does not lie in a fixed truth but rather the stories we tell ourselves, intertwined with insecurities and idealisations that turn such memories into a projection of regrets and desires.
BBC’s Normal People (2020): Can love survive with the flaws that make us human?
The twelve-part adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel of the same name explores the turbulent relationship of two Irish youths, Marianne and Connell, as they navigate secondary school, university and beyond.
Coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds while holding contrasting reputations at school, their biggest challenge lies in mediating these dynamics while facing their growing attraction for each other. After leaving their hometown, they reconnect several times throughout their early adulthood, bringing new social pressures and insecurities with each encounter, especially against the prestigious backdrop of Trinity College Dublin.
The gentle wavering of the camera and its intimate framing create an immersive atmosphere, exposing the audience to subtle emotions and truths that were left unsaid. Through this realist lens, Normal People is an exploration of the deeply human aspects of young love as something fragile, moulded by societal constraints and therefore ridden with miscommunication.
18x2 Beyond Youthful Days (2024): Sometimes, love’s truest form is found in memory, not in forever.
18X2 Beyond Youthful Days centres on Jimmy, a Taiwanese game developer, who loses his job at the video game company he started. The collapse of his career pushes him to travel to Japan and revisits his memories of Ami, a Japanese backpacker he met at eighteen, now seen in a new light.
The dual timeline shows Jimmy’s constant reflection and flashbacks to the summer he spent with Ami and how the memories guide his travels towards her hometown of Fukushima eighteen years later. Through snowy train rides and lantern festivals, the film brings forth how love is often tied to places as much as it is to people, forever lingering in the memories of shared moments.
Therefore, just like the title suggests, Beyond Youthful Days is a lesson on how love silently endures beyond physical connection. It lives on in the texture of time and space, roughened by the postcards and movie tickets, strengthened by wishes and dreams of the past and continues on in the life someone has created with the impact that remains.
Unfortunately, these movies cannot fully answer the question of whether love is worth it because that’s kind of the point (Sorry!). Mainstream cinema projects highly idealised romanticism that insists on a smooth journey to permanence and pure love, but Eternal Sunshine, Normal People and Beyond Youthful Days argue otherwise. They don’t create expectations for romance, nor do they build hope for something that may never happen.
In the end, love in these stories is not an eternal destination but a mirror to the human condition — a reflection of those who flee from it, those who return to it despite the weight of the world, and those suspended between memory, longing, and the acceptance of what might have been.
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