Clockwise from top left: 'Midsommar,' 'Fatal Attraction,' 'Anatomy of a Fall,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' A24, Paramount, Neon, Warner Bros. Valentine's Day is the high holy season of rom-com delusion - a pink-and-red industrial complex built on meet-cutes, misunderstood texts and the ironclad promise that true love is just one plucky airport sprint away. It's the time of year when Hallmark heartthrobs renovate both farmhouses and emotional damage in under 90 minutes, when opposites attract, exes are neatly dispatched and happily ever after arrives gift-wrapped in a closing montage set to an acoustic pop cover. Sorry to break it to you, but real romance is messier. We fall hard for the wrong people. We stay too long for the wrong reasons. Passion curdles into resentment; grand gestures age into passive-aggressive silences. As Nicolas Cage once memorably raged (in the actually quite romantic Moonlight), we're here "to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die." Not exactly tandem bikes in Central Park. So this Feb. 14, consider this list an antidote to the chocolate-box fantasy. The Hollywood Reporter is skipping the schmaltz and spotlighting the films that torch the myth of everlasting bliss - these are movies designed to stress-test your relationship. They dissect desire, dismantle devotion and leave "happily ever after" bleeding out on the floor. It's the ultimate anti-romance collection. 'Anatomy of a Fall' Image Credit: Courtesy of Neon A man falls to his death outside a remote chalet. Was it suicide, an accident or murder? Justine Triet's Palme d'Or winner pretends to be a courtroom thriller about the mechanics of a suspicious death. It's really the forensic dissection of a marriage so bruised and brittle that love becomes inadmissible evidence. As the wife stands trial - the Oscar-nominated Sandra Hüller, perfectly inscrutable - nothing is off limits. Every domestic argument becomes an exhibit for the prosecution, with every insult, every piece of professional or sexual jealousy, every offhand cruelty parsed and examined. The question isn't just whether she pushed him out the window, but whether the couple pushed each other to the brink. Watching this on a date is like inviting a judge in to moderate your next fight. 'Antichrist' Image Credit: IFC /Photofest Lars von Trier's grief-soaked horror begins with the death of a child and somehow spirals downward from there. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple retreating to a woodland cabin to process trauma. What unfolds is part therapy session, as Dafoe's therapist husband tries to "treat" his wife's anguish, and part medieval nightmare, as Gainsbourg's sorrow metastasizes into rage, fear and violence. In the end, nature itself appears to conspire against them. Between the mutilation and psychosexual torment, von Trier's vision of heterosexual intimacy as apocalyptic emerges. Sex becomes a weapon, therapy a means of control, and we are all helpless in the face of the feral world around us. A romantic couples' retreat this is not. 'Audition' Image Credit: (C)Vitagraph Films/courtesy Everett Collection It starts like a wistful, if slightly creepy, romance. A lonely widower (Ryo Ishibashi), encouraged by his teenage son to remarry, stages a fake film audition as a pretext to meet women and lands on Asami (Eihi Shiina), a former ballerina who appears soft-spoken, wounded and exquisitely attentive. Takashi Miike shoots their early encounters with disarming gentleness: quiet dinners, shy smiles, the promise of second chances. For a stretch, it plays like a melancholy story about healing after loss. Then the trapdoor opens. The very premise - a man "casting" a wife from a lineup of hopefuls - curdles into a critique of male entitlement and misogyny. Asami's fragility reveals a bottomless well of trauma and rage, and the film's infamous final act transforms courtship into calculated torture. Audition doesn't just sabotage the rom-com fantasy; it punishes it, suggesting that treating love like an audition may result in a performance you never rehearsed for. 'Bad Timing' Image Credit: (c) World Northal/courtesy Everett Collection Nicolas Roeg's fractured love story is less a romance than a postmortem conducted in shards of memory. Milena (Theresa Russell) is discovered after an apparent suicide attempt; her lover, Alex (Art Garfunkel), an American psychoanalyst in Vienna, reconstructs their affair through splintered flashbacks. The nonlinear structure mirrors emotional disarray, refusing the comforting arc of meet-cute to reconciliation. What emerges is obsession masquerading as passion. Alex intellectualizes his jealousy even as he tightens his grip; Milena oscillates between vulnerability and defiance. Sex scenes feel less erotic than coercive, intimacy tinged with control. The film's most disturbing turn reframes a supposed act of rescue as violation, dismantling the notion that love excuses everything. Bad Timin