Toxic Movie Romance in Twilight and Saltburn

Graphics by Anika Dua

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the Twilight series and Saltburn. 

Sooo movie romance – let’s talk about it. Specifically, the lowkey disturbing dynamics of romance in Twilight and Saltburn, which might not be the most intuitive paring, but walk with us here. 

Firstly, let’s discuss the beloved cult-classic Twilight. Now we love this movie as much as the next Tumblr girly but can we just say that watching the movies again when you’re older than Bella kind of makes you question why this movie was so praised? There are a ton of red flags sprinkled throughout this entire series, the biggest one being Bella and Edward’s entire relationship. Watching this back in high school thinking abandoning all your friends and family for this beautiful, immortal vampire was peak romance was quite the message to give to millions of people. Can we just appreciate how utterly apathetic Bella was to constantly keeping her green flag father in the dark about everything and even okay with having to run off with the Cullens and never see him or her mom again? Or when she jumped off a cliff to blackmail Edward into coming back for her even though he left for her own safety? Talk about toxic! Aaand last but not least, Jacob imprinting on Bella’s newborn daughter (let’s not even get into the dark, dark implications of this) in order to wrap the series up? When the cards are spread like that, it gets a little wild huh? 

Now, Saltburn, a more recent movie that is quite the experience if we do say so ourselves. It becomes extremely clear by the end of the movie, but boy, Oliver’s manipulation of the people around him makes Bella look like a saint. Now to address the elephant in the room, or in this case, three elephants named “the bathtub scene” “the vampire scene” and “the graveyard scene” these are about as skin-crawly, should-I-be-watching-this-on-the-living-room-TV kind of disturbing as you get, truly. The movie really makes you question what romance really is as you watch Oliver abuse love and sex in order to get what he wants. And yet, here we are, basking in all of it, soaking in the toxicity. 

Even if you’re a die-hard Twilight fan or gave Saltburn a five star rating on Letterboxd, if the CEO of our dream company were to ask us about our favorite movie, I think we’d hesitate to name these two movies. Why? Because they’re toxic guilty pleasures at their finest. And we eat it up everytime.