As A24 releases The Drama, Koktail dives into 8 films where marriages fall apart.

Making its way to Bangkok screens this week, The Drama – the latest from Kristoffer Borgli and the A24 studio – embraces drama in every sense. From its attention-grabbing PR strategy to a central dramatic turn that anchors the narrative, the film thrives on provocation, leaving critics to wrestle with its uneasy moral terrain.

Its marketing is deliberately designed to present the film as just another offbeat romantic story about a wedding gone askew, but beneath that familiar setup lies something far darker and more unsettling. That sense of unease feels almost assured, given that Ari Aster, known for Midsommar (2019) and Hereditary (2018), is credited as a producer on the film.

With its release, Koktail takes the opportunity to look back at films about marriages gone wrong, a theme cinema keeps coming back to for good reason. It’s often less about romance than about what happens after the honeymoon phase fades: when frustration and unmet expectations start to take over, when love turns into routine.

1/8 The Drama (2026) / dir. Kristoffer Borgli

“It’s a wedding, it’s performative by nature.”

In the week before their wedding, a couple is shaken by a drunken confession that threatens to derail their ceremony.

The film follows Emma (Zendaya), the bride-to-be, and Charlie (Robert Pattinson), the groom-to-be, in the week leading up to their wedding, as a troubling revelation emerging from a drunken confession among friends threatens to derail the ceremony, perhaps indefinitely. Also starring Alana Haim, Mamoudou Athie, and Hailey Gates, The Drama probes how the past can resurface to haunt the present, and how morality (especially in its more self-righteous forms) can stand in the way of love. It also reflects on romance in the age of cancel culture, where personal history becomes increasingly difficult to outrun.

2/8 Anatomy of a Fall (2023) / dir. Justine Triet

“You complain about the life that you chose! You are not a victim. Not at all.”

In a snowbound alpine silence, a family’s secluded life fractures when a husband’s body is found beneath their chalet.

Justine Triet’s exploration of truth and justice, particularly where they intersect with gender politics, earned her the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. For many viewers unfamiliar with Sandra Hüller, this film served as a defining introduction, functioning very much as her vehicle, and she delivers a remarkable performance. It’s a film that invites debate: whether the act in question occurred, and if it did, whether it can be justified. The husband’s fatal fall becomes a metaphor for the collapse of the marriage itself, with the audience drawn into dissecting its structure – an anatomy of disintegration.

3/8 Marriage Story (2019) / dir. Noah Baumbach

“I realised I never really came alive for myself. I was just feeding his aliveness.”

A theatre director and actress confront the slow erosion of their marriage, one that no amount of therapy can fully repair.

Noah Baumbach’s depiction of a marriage falling apart sees Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson at their most theatrical, quite literally. The film often plays like a stage production, driven by extended dialogue and emotional monologues rather than conventional cinematic action. It follows Charlie (Driver), a theatre director, and Nicole (Johansson), an actress, as they confront the slow erosion of their relationship, a process no amount of therapy can fully repair.

Rather than simply portraying love breaking down, the film explores how each partner comes to recognise the other’s full, unvarnished self. Divorce here is shown as painful and messy, yet also as a process through which a family (very loosely defined) attempts to endure and remain connected. Central to this is their son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), with custody tensions underscoring the emotional and practical fractures left in the wake of separation.

4/8 Revolutionary Road (2008) / dir. Sam Mendes

“Tell me the truth, Frank, remember that? We used to live by it.”

A disillusioned couple in 1950s suburbia sees their fragile marriage unravel when an unexpected pregnancy forces a painful reckoning.

Adapted from Richard Yates’s acclaimed 1961 novel about suburban American disillusionment, Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on screen for the first time since Titanic (1997). This time, they portray a deeply unhappy married couple struggling under the pressure of unfulfilled ambitions and a shared yearning to break free from the conformity and emotional isolation of 1950s America. 

The situation is already worsening for Frank (DiCaprio), who feels trapped in a dead-end, hopeless job, and for April (Winslet), who is equally stuck in a loveless marriage. However, when April discovers that she is pregnant, her plan to pursue an abortion becomes the final straw, pushing their already fragile circumstances beyond breaking point.

5/8 Trouble Every Day (2001) / dir. Claire Denis

“I love you so much I could eat you…”

On their honeymoon, a man’s obsession with a vanished doctor reveals a chilling hidden life.

Describing a Claire Denis film isn’t easy. Cinephiles tend to admire her work, especially Beau Travail (1999), even if she herself is less fond of cinephile culture. Trouble Every Day is one of those films that really splits opinion. Some critics were taken aback by her approach, while others outright called it a misstep. It’s definitely polarising, and honestly, it’s better to go in blind. Just be ready for something shocking, especially with Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle on board. This might be the most purely arthouse entry on the list.

6/8 Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) / dir. Robert Benton

“She didn’t leave because of you. She left because of me.”

A young boy is caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle as his parents’ marriage collapses into bitter legal conflict.

The highest-grossing film of 1979 in the United States and Canada, directed by Robert Benton, centres on the deep psychological toll of parental separation, particularly on the child caught in the middle. The emotional impact is most keenly felt by Billy Kramer (Justin Henry), whose life is upended as he becomes the focus of a bitter legal struggle.

The title refers directly to the custody dispute between Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) and Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep), whose conflict plays out both in court and within the spaces of their fractured family life. Both Hoffman and Streep delivered widely acclaimed performances, ultimately earning them Academy Awards at the 52nd Oscars for their portrayals.

7/8 Scenes from a Marriage (1974) / dir. Ingmar Bergman

“However trite, it’s the truth. We’re emotional illiterates.”

A couple’s marriage slowly unravels over time as love gives way to resentment, distance and emotional disconnection.

Liv Ullmann, closely associated with the renowned Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and one of his most frequent collaborators, stars alongside Erland Josephson in this intimate, years-spanning portrait of a marriage gradually unravelling. Originally conceived and filmed by Bergman as a six-part television series, it was later condensed into a feature film. 

In many ways, Ullmann’s character seems to echo her own complex personal and professional relationship with Bergman. While the work can be read through the lens of women’s liberation and the broader cultural shifts of its time, Scenes from a Marriage ultimately stands as a foundational text in the cinematic exploration of relationships. Its influence can be traced through the work of later filmmakers such as Woody Allen, Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach (see above), who have all drawn on its raw, introspective approach to depicting the emotional complexity of romance that has run its course.

8/8 Faces (1968) / dir. John Cassavetes

“I think we’re making fools of ourselves.”

A marriage breaks apart in middle age, sending both partners into the arms of strangers in search of youth and desire.

Some uncompromising cinephiles might argue that Cassavetes’s greatest film is A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which is also about a troubled marriage and a wife increasingly coming off the deep end, raising broader questions about gender norms and the suffocating nature of domestic life. However, Faces doesn’t shy away from these concerns either. Critic Ray Carney views it as part of Cassavetes’s unofficial “marriage trilogy,” and it is fair to say that it is Cassavetes’s most despairing statement on marital love to date. 

Like A Woman Under the Influence, which would follow later, Cassavetes cast his wife Gena Rowlands in Faces, where she plays Jeannie, a sex worker whose encounter with the middle-aged Richard (John Marley) contributes to his gradual emotional drift away from his wife, Maria (Lynn Carlin). Maria herself also begins to explore a new romantic possibility with a younger man. The film is a stark portrait of a marriage in collapse, as both partners slowly lose interest in one another and find themselves at an emotional dead end. There may be a faint possibility of reconciliation, or perhaps not, as time passes and both continue to age day by day.