Splitsville & the 8 Best Indie Rom-Coms of the Last 10 Years, Ranked
One of Hollywood’s biggest mistakes of the last 10 years has been allowing the theatrical rom-com to essentially die out. The genre was one of the industry's biggest earners in the ‘80s and ‘90s, to the point that Pretty Woman was, for a brief time, the fifth-highest-grossing movie ever made.
As comedies and romantic films have been pushed out of cinemas and onto streaming platforms in that time, however, a new crop of indie filmmakers has started to pick up the genre, play around with its components, and make it their own.
It’s true: if you’d told a festival attendee during the heydays of Sundance, Cannes or the Berlinale that those places would one day become a launch pad for these kinds of things, they probably would have asked to leave. Yet, that really has been the case in the last ten years, and that’s something I think we can be quite grateful for, not least for a film like Splitsville, which brought the house down at its Cannes premiere last May and now (from March 27) is finally in UK cinemas.
In the list below, you’ll find nine of the best indie rom-coms that have been released in that period, which I’ve ranked in ascending order — any one of which I would happily take over the likes of Regretting You, Materialists or Anyone But You. Read on to discover more about each movie and use the guide below to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
With Rye Lane, Raine Allen Miller brought the setup of a classic Richard Linklater walk-and-talk (ala Before Sunrise and Before Sunset) to the streets of London for a delightfully colloquial romance that added yet another string to up-and-coming actor David Jonsson’s bow.
For this one, the Alien: Romulus star plays Dom alongside Vivian Oparah’s Yas — two strangers who meet and maybe fall in love as they bop around the art galleries, back gardens, and markets of South London. There is even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from a certain member of the ‘90s British rom-com royalty — a passing of the torch moment, if ever there was one.
Maya Erskine and Jack Quaid make for a wonderfully cute pairing in Plus One, a movie that takes one aspect of the Four Weddings and a Funeral formula and spins it out into an indie rom-com all its own.
We are talking, specifically, about the trope of two long-term single friends who agree to be each other’s dates during a particularly busy period of friends’ and colleagues’ weddings. No points for guessing what happens next.
Produced by Amazon-MGM and boasting a bona fide A-lister in the lead role doesn’t exactly scream “indie”, but The Idea of You does have the feel of other movies on this list, if not the same relatively thrifty budget.
This one works as a kind of unlikely May-August romance between Hathaway’s divorced art gallery owner and Nicholas Galitzine’s hunky pop star, who she meets while chaperoning her daughter at his concert — although, as Hathaway obviously looks like Anne Hathaway, “unlikely” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
A winner of the Best Dramatic Feature award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, it’s surprising that this movie kind of went a little under the radar. Maybe it’s something to do with that mouthful of a title, but Cha Cha Real Smooth, another slight-age-gap romance between a younger guy and an older woman, still works a charm.
For this one, the potential romance is between a 22-year-old bar mitzvah DJ, played by writer-director Cooper Raiff, and a young mother played by Dakota Johnson — and if you think it’s a little on-the-nose for a filmmaker to cast such an A-list heartthrob as their own love interest, it’s not the only time on this list that it happens…
Just about making the cut for our decade of indie rom-coms is The Big Sick, a movie that took writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon all the way from a Sundance premiere in January 2017 to a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the 2018 Oscars.
Given that Nanjiani and Gordon’s story — about a comedian who falls for someone only for them to soon fall into a coma — was inspired by their own romantic experience together, it would take a cold heart not to be on board with this one. Nanjiani, as you might expect, plays himself alongside Zoe Kazan in the Gordon role. Nine years on, it remains an unmitigated delight.
In 2019, Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin achieved the unlikely feat of taking The Climb (a buddy comedy that they co-wrote, directed and co-starred in) to the Cannes Film Festival — where it won a prize and brought the house down. They repeated that trick last year with Splitsville, a polyamory screwball comedy in which the two friends (not unlike Cooper Raiff, as mentioned above) play the unlikely partners of Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona — although at least here, I think, those pairings are mostly played for laughs.
Releasing to UK cinemas this week, this is already looking like one of the best comedies of the year, and thanks to Last Black Man in San Francisco cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s adventurous oners, it’s also an incredible film to watch.
If you’ve never seen a movie by Aki Kaurismäki before, Fallen Leaves is a perfect place to start. The deadpan, chain-smoking, godfather of Finnish cinema has been making films as dry and hilarious as this since the 1980s (like Ariel and The Match Factory Girl), but Leaves also packs an endearing hit of old-old-old school Hollywood romance.
The story follows a labourer, named Holappa, and a dishwasher, named Ansa, who meet, go to the movies, and maybe fall in love. Time magazine called it the best film of 2023, and it’s 81 minutes long — so, if you’ve yet to see it, give it a shot.
Palm Springs might only rank in second place on our list, but — fittingly enough for the film’s central conceit — it’s probably the most rewatchable of any indie rom-com.
Starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, Springs works a little like Plus One, only that Samberg and Milioti’s characters end up attending the same wedding again and again. Released during lockdown to the delight of entertainment-starved viewers around the world, this indie rom-com answer to Groundhog Day is such a satisfying watch that it’s honestly amazing nobody thought of the concept before.
It was difficult to separate the top three movies on our rundown of the best indie rom-coms of the last decade, but given the recent Oscar success of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, it only felt right to put that film’s (IMO superior) predecessor at number one.
Starring an effervescent Renate Reinsve (who was about to quit acting before Trier came along with the role and can now count herself as an Oscar nominee), The Worst Person in the World is a film about the quarter-life anxieties of perennially single people, but it’s also endlessly romantic and features two of the best meet-cutes of recent cinema. In the second of these, Reinsve's Julie and a guy named Eivind meet at a party and try to think of all the things they can do together that wouldn’t constitute cheating on their respective partners. It’s the kind of movie you could recommend to anyone.
