Why can’t lovers be together forever? Our pick of ‘bad-ending’ love stories

Written by Olie Ma

If true love exists, why can’t people in love make it to the end? KISS KISS rounds up the best films with the saddest endings.

If you have ever questioned true love or questioned why your relationship didn’t work,  then Kiss Kiss Magazine’s pick of tragi-romance films might give you a different perspective. Sometimes we cry over these stories not only because the characters feel real and the love feels tender, but because each bad ending points beyond romance. These films use a relationship’s break-up to ask bigger questions.

Can perfectly matched soulmates really stay together forever? 

If someone walks into your life and, by some ridiculous coincidence, they love the same books, the same kind of films, even the same niche little hobbies, so much so that they feel like another version of you, would you fall for them? That’s exactly what happens to Mugi Yamane and Kinu Hachiya. Late one night at a subway station,  missing the last train throws two young strangers together. As they talk, they’re almost stunned by how closely their habits, tastes, and values line up. Affection grows quietly, and becoming a couple feels like the most natural thing in the world.  Then graduation arrives, and reality with it. A relationship held up mainly by ideals can turn out to be far more fragile than it ever seemed.

 Lovers who keep missing each other might just not have the ” inyeon” to be together. 

Nora, a Korean woman who moved to the US as a child, lives between two worlds.  With her childhood friend Hae Sung, she shares the same early memories and the same mother tongue. In her new life, though, she learns to love in a different language, at a different pace. Her first love was cut short by migration in the 1990s.  Twelve years later, they reconnect on Facebook, only to let go again as the couple is pulled in different directions by the lives they have chosen. Another 12 years pass before they finally meet in the same city, all grown up. The film returns repeatedly to the idea of “inyeon”: this is not a cheesy version of “meant to be”; instead, it’s closer to a distinctly East Asian sense of karmic ties. It is an explanation for why two lives cross at one moment, and why, in the end, they may still only brush past each other.

The moment we chose to say goodbye, we loved each other most. 

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, love arrives with a countdown already ticking. On an isolated island in the 18th century, the painter Marianne is commissioned to create a wedding portrait of Héloïse. Héloïse refuses to sit. She knows the day the portrait is finished is the day her freedom ends. Marianne is made to pose as her walking companion, spending ordinary days beside her while quietly studying Héloïse – her profile, the way she holds her hands, the set of her mouth – so she can paint the portrait later from memory. At this moment, looking stops being observation and becomes recognition. They begin to watch each other, understand each other, and hold each other close on the windswept island, as if warmth could be made from nothing but a shared gaze. They know the world will not bless them. The engagement will not be undone. The island is not a refuge. And yet this love is still worth beginning.  

What if the person you love is only your hallucination? 

Adam is a screenwriter living in a high-rise in London. The building is almost empty,  and so is his life. One night, his neighbour, Harry, shows up at his door, drunk, and cracks open what looks like Adam’s quiet routine. They don’t really connect that first time, but fate has a way of looping back. Again and again, it pushes them into each other’s path. And almost without meaning to, they slip into something intimate.  And then the world starts to tilt. More and more things happen that simply don’t make sense, as if from the very beginning, something about all of this was fundamentally wrong. The film is built on a chain of twists, each one locking neatly into the next. By the end, you’ll understand – suddenly, painfully – and you might find yourself crying before you even realise it.

The most painful kind of separation in the world may not be love fading but being torn apart by life and death. 

A Touch of Green is adapted from the short story of the same name in Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People. Set in the turbulent years from the aftermath of World War II  through the Chinese Civil War and the period surrounding the retreat to Taiwan, it follows the love between Zhu Qing, a university student, and Guo Zhen, an air force officer, under the shadow of war. But in that era, love was never just a private matter.  Flights, orders, transfers, departures, and an invisible hand turn “see you tomorrow” into an unimaginable luxury.  As you watch, you may not even be sure why you’re crying: for the brief, blazing intensity of love, or for the heavier weight of systems, history, and wartime trauma. One of the series “When men’s war ends, women’s war begins.” It captures the show’s core idea that the aftermath is often shouldered by those who are left behind.