The Weirdest Movie Couples

There are weird movie couples, and then there is Harold Chasen and Maude Chardin. Harold is a rich young man obsessed with death. He drives a hearse, pretends to kill himself in various horrific ways, and attends random funerals just for the lols.

Maude, on the other hand, is a 79-year-old concentration camp survivor planning to commit suicide for real on her 80th birthday. The two meet at a funeral and form an unlikely bond that blossoms into one of cinema’s most peculiar romances.

A black comedy with a bittersweet ending, Harold and Maude just might be the most unconventional rom-com to come out of the ’70s—or any other decade, for that matter.

What if someone fell in love with Siri? That’s the premise behind Her. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a soon-to-be-divorced sadsack that falls in love with an AI he names Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

While this movie couple isn’t the only one on the list to feature a partner who isn’t technically alive, it is the only one threatening to become an inescapable reality.

With the recent leaps in AI intelligence, Her‘s premise is less a question of “Could this really happen?” and more a question of “When will this happen?” Though no one has fallen head over heels for ChatGPT yet (that we know of, at least), it’s only a matter of time before someone does.

Eddie Brock is a reporter. The symbiote is an alien goo-suit from outer space with a hunger for human flesh. Together they’re an unlikely pair called Venom that bicker like an old married couple but can’t seem to live without each other.

There may have been allusions to the relationship between Eddie and the symbiote being more than just a working relationship in the first Venom, but it wasn’t until the sequel that the pair really became an allegory for two men in love.

The movie isn’t even particularly subtle about its symbolism. In one of Carnage‘s funniest scenes—you can watch it here—the symbiote, freed from its host, Eddie, goes to an EDM rave and declares itself “out of the closet.”

Even director Andy Serkis described the film as a love affair between Eddie and the symbiote. While Venom might not be the weirdest queer icon—that would be the Babadook—they’re certainly up there.

Only Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the evil geniuses behind South Park, could come up with a movie couple as insane (and offensive) as real-life dictator Saddam Hussein and Judeo-Christian fallen angel Satan.

When South Park resident Kenny dies for the umpteenth time, he goes to hell, where he finds to his—and the audience’s—surprise that the ruler of hell is shacking up with the villain behind Operation Desert Storm.

What initially seems to be a match made purely for shock value slowly becomes a rumination on abusive relationships. It’s only after Kenny helps Satan gather the courage needed to stand up to Saddam that the film’s (relatively) happy ending can take place.

Gremlins 2 is maybe the weirdest sequel ever made. The famous Key & Peele sketch about the making of the movie only scratches the surface of the twisted, meta cartoon that is Gremlins 2.

Despite featuring a spider-gremlin, a gremlin made out of vegetables, and a fourth-wall-breaking cameo that features either Hulk Hogan or John Wayne, depending on whether you watched the movie in the theater or on VHS, Gremlins 2‘s freakiest creation is easily Greta, the female gremlin.

Loosely resembling Yoda in drag, Greta has a…unique look, to say the least. When she’s locked in a bathroom with business exec Forster—Star Trek: Voyager’s Robert Picardo—it’s not exactly love at first sight.

But thanks to some persistence on Greta’s part, Forster eventually comes around to her…er….charms. The result is easily the strangest-looking movie couple on this list.

Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, is a kind but socially awkward man who begins a relationship with a sex doll he names Bianca. What could easily be played for perverse laughs and raunchy hijinks is, instead, a sweet and sad coping mechanism for a man with more than a few “issues” to work through.

Lars and Bianca might be the most abnormal movie couple on this list, but in their own way, they’re also the most innocent. Rather than use Bianca for her intended purpose, Lars instead uses her as a kind of practice girlfriend to talk to and keep him company until, with the help of his friends, he’s ready for the real thing.

If this list was for the “Movie Couples With The Ugliest Children,” Donkey and Dragon would be #1, no contest. The abominations known as “Dronkeys” —half-donkey, half-dragon monstrosities that make Cthulu look like a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model—pop up in the Shrek sequels.

They force the viewer to imagine how physical love between a small donkey and a giant dragon can even work.

Even putting aside the size difference, how does a warm-blooded mammal even produce children with a presumably cold-blooded reptile? The very thought of Donkey and Dragon consummating their relationship is the stuff of nightmares.

Instead, it’s best to just chalk it up to the Jurrasic Park theory on impossible mating situations in the animal kingdom. Life…uh…finds a way.

Jim Carrey’s Joel is a boring square whose only creative outlet is the secret sketches he makes in his diary. Clementine, played by Kate Winslet, is, on the surface, the very definition of a “manic pixie dream girl.”

But beneath her candy-colored hair and quirky exterior, Clementine is a woman with low self-esteem and substance abuse issues.

The two are doomed from the start and yet, somehow fated to be together, as evidenced by the way Joel and Clementine find their way back into each other’s arms after each has the other’s existence completely erased from their brain.

It’s a relationship as strange as the movie itself and just as beautiful.

Fairy tale probably isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of Tim Burton, and yet that’s exactly what Edward Scissorhands is.

It’s a modern fairy tale complete with a fairy tale romance between Winona Ryder’s Kim and Johhny Depp’s scissorhanded Frankenstein (or is he a robot?) Edward. Ok, so it’s not a conventional fairy tale, but that doesn’t make it any less magical.

Think of it as an absynthe-induced fever dream version of Beauty and the Beast by way of Hot Topic. Edward represents Burton’s usual gothic side, while Kim is the typical suburban American identity that Tim pretends he hates but secretly finds comfort in. Together they’re the movie couple at the heart of the director’s sweetest, most personal movie.