It’s mid-February, which means love is in the air, elaborate dates are being planned and couples are flocking to multiplexes, perhaps hoping to see a much-advertised new romantic entanglement from the lovably yearning singleton Bridget Jones. They won’t actually find her there, though; in the United States, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is only playing on Peacock. In US movie theaters, the date crowd can find plenty of Valentine’s Day-themed entertainment, but they’ll have to steel themselves for the sight of reds and pinks that aren’t strictly decorative.

This year’s gory holiday-adjacent offerings including the Valentine’s-set Love Hurts, in which a seemingly mild-mannered realtor reconnects with a lost love and they are violently confronted with all the people who want both of them dead; the Valentine’s-set Heart Eyes, in which a masked serial killer stalks and murders couples; and Companion, about a robot girlfriend who turns deadly when betrayed by stupid humans. Couples who don’t care for horror or action might instead turn toward (or stumble upon) I Love You Forever, an ironically titled indie dramedy about an emotionally abusive relationship, or Love Me, which is a sweet and earnest love story … that also takes place between two machines long after the complete demise of Earth’s population.

The fact that there aren’t any straightforward romances or romcoms playing in theaters isn’t exactly shocking; big-ticket romances were on the wane before the pandemic, which induced even further caution from studios obsessed with must-see spectacle. Still, the 2020s pivot away from romance is nonetheless relatively sudden; throughout the 2010s, those same studios maintained a lingering sense of responsibility for releasing something romance-related during February, whether sexed-up and franchised via the 50 Shades trilogy; vaguely Galentine’s Day-oriented, like How to Be Single, the Dakota Johnson not-quite-romance that supplemented her 50 Shades movies; or affectionately spoofy, like Rebel Wilson’s Isn’t It Romantic? Post-Covid, the former romcom queen Jennifer Lopez deigned to give it another shot with Marry Me, but for the most part anyone seeking on-screen romance must poke around on streaming channels, just like a Christmas movie junkie around early December – though at least a few Christmas movies still make it into theaters on the regular.

Odder still, then, that movies like Heart Eyes, Love Hurts, and Companion would position themselves as ironic counterpoints to a nonexistent flood of popular romances, rather than the celebratory ribbing of the Rebel Wilson comedy. Yes, it’s a fun gag that Companion’s trailer advertises itself as from the studio that made The Notebook – but The Notebook, beloved as it is, came out over 20 years ago! Jokingly calling New Line the studio that made Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy would be a timelier reference.

That sort of cheekiness helps to conceal the secret of this year’s crop of genre valentines: at least a few of them place an outsized importance on the holiday itself, one rarely seen in the real world – or even more traditional romantic comedies, which are rarely set on the holiday itself, perhaps out of fear of looking shallow or tacky. (Garry Marshall’s appalling 2010 ensemble Valentine’s Day is the exception that proves the rule.) Yet in Love Hurts, Marvin (Ke Huy Quan) waxes rhapsodic, and nonsensical, about how a universal truth of Valentine’s Day is that it holds such capacity for life-changing surprise. (Does it, though? Is that what it’s really known for? Not just dinner reservations and Russell Stover?) Heart Eyes, meanwhile, stages a major scene at a Valentine’s Day carnival (?) where adult couples gather to watch a drive-in marathon of romantic movies, including the classic His Girl Friday – undeterred, even, by the well-established threat of a holiday-themed murderer.

That’s because Heart Eyes ultimately wants to take as much inspiration from a movie like His Girl Friday, or the half-dozen 2000s-era romantic comedies it jokingly references in a verbal torrent at one point – from slashers like Valentine (which it kind of resembles in plot) or My Bloody Valentine (which the film’s villain sort of resembles in mask). It really is a fusion of romcom and horror, and quite a good one; its major drawback, in fact, is the way the screenplay makes its leads talk with utmost seriousness about their philosophies of love, rather than just letting them banter their way into each other’s hearts, and ours. (Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding make a cute couple nonetheless.)

Love Hurts is more arch and less successful. It takes the ingredients for a perfectly fun American equivalent of a Jackie Chan movie, with Quan from Everything Everywhere All at Once as the scrappy little guy who doesn’t want to choose violence but can kick ass resourcefully when cornered, then insistently overcooks them with discount Tarantino and John Wick seasoning. But the movie does ultimately believe in the bond between characters played by Quan and Ariana DeBose, no matter how little chemistry the actors have; same goes for a tertiary couple played by Lio Tipton and Mustafa Shakir, whose instant mutual attraction is played for laughs at first, but not exactly jokes. You’re supposed to start to roll your eyes, then catch yourself really believing in them as one kind of cutesiness – violent, quasi-irreverent – is used to disguise another. If Heart Eyes might conceivably lure romcom aficionados and horror fans into common ground, Love Hurts seems far likelier to please exactly no one. Smarminess and sweetness don’t really mix.

Companion, meanwhile, offers a more genuinely cynical view of gender dynamics, albeit in a way that seems almost entirely inherited from pre-existing (and better) screenplays. That’s the other thing about this year’s anti-Valentines; whether chock full of explicit references or not, they all paradoxically seek to transcend predictability while nonetheless depending largely on the existence of other movies. This is true even for a tiny, realistic indie like I Love You Forever: it starts off feeling like a twentysomething romcom – film-maker and co-star Cazzie David is more than funny enough to fake it – before using that framework to make an intentionally jarring pivot into harrowing, wearying chronicle of emotional abuse (with a few stray, interestingly discordant laughs along the way). This is supposed to be a canny bit of subversion, but sometimes feels as if the movie is using that subversion to trick itself, too, into thinking the material can sustain a feature film.

There’s nothing wrong with genre-hopping, or trying to subvert romantic conventions; Hollywood has made enough swoony romances to supply years’ worth of violent or dysfunctional glosses on that material. With a multiple-front war on bodily autonomy, it makes sense that old-fashioned romance might seem beside the point, and demand for a bloodier catharsis might shoot up. No wonder that this counterprogramming shows up on streaming, too; Shudder is taking Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to premiere The Dead Thing, which starts off as a noir-ish riff on hook-up culture before veering into spookier, more uncanny territory that relates to a kind of bodily awareness. It’s clever, sometimes unnerving, and avoids becoming self-conscious about its own genre conventions, seemingly understanding that sometimes it’s more effective to just be what you’re trying to be, rather than explaining what you’re not.

All of this year’s anti-Valentines are at least interesting or entertaining, some wildly so. But taken together, it’s a bit like sifting through a bunch of dating profiles with the same overconfident insistence: we’re not like the other losers on this app. We’re the cool girl, or the clever guy. It’s a more effective pitch with a bunch of normies around.