Thrillers about psychotic ex-boyfriends stalking and terrorizing ex-girlfriends are enjoying extra relevance today, largely due to the prevailing #MeToo persuasion that 85% of white cisgender males are essentially toxic and in many cases bad-news oppressors.
The crazy former boyfriend is sometimes portrayed in horror-flick terms, or certainly by Act Three — unhinged, murderous.
Andrew Semans‘ Resurrection seems to have gone this route with Tim Roth as the fiendish ex and Rebecca Hall (who always over-acts) as the former girlfriend. (Speaking of wackjobs from the past, does anyone remember The Gift, in which Hall costarred?)
The first noteworthy psycho-ex-boyfriend movie was Joseph Ruben‘s Sleeping With The Enemy (’91). Mpustachioed Patrick Bergin actually played Julia Roberts‘ lunatic ex-husband. Roberts had to shoot him three times to make sure he was dead.
If you ask me the most realistic and believable woman-protagonist drama that dealt with a must-to-avoid ex-husband was Molly Smith Metzler‘s Maid, the Netflix miniseries that premiered last October.
Crazy ex-girlfriend flicks are, I suspect, not currently permitted. If Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction (’87) had never been produced 35 years ago, you sure as shit could never make it today. The only way it could get past the woke commissars would be if Glenn Close‘s Alex was the somewhat sympathetic protagonist and Michael Douglas was the bad guy.