Movies to Watch After a Breakup: Five Films for the Week You Keep Checking Your Phone

It's the fourth night. You've mostly stopped crying in the shower, but your thumb keeps opening their name in your messages as if it has a mind of its own, scrolls up past the last thing they said, and stops. The hoodie is still on the chair. That one song is ruined for at least a year. Your friends have said all the right things, and they were right, and it didn't help, because nothing helps yet.

What a movie can do is smaller and better than advice. It can sit next to you for two hours and prove that somebody else felt exactly this ridiculous, this furious, this tempted to rewrite the past, and came out the other side. So here are five films for the week after a breakup, ordered like a long night of getting over someone: we laugh at rock bottom first, then get angry, then take an honest look at the person who leaves, hit the big heartbreak in the middle, and close on the gentlest movie we know about two bruised people being kind to each other. Put the phone face down. Let's begin.

1. Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)

What it is: Sharon Maguire's romantic comedy, adapted from Helen Fielding's novel, which was itself a loose riff on Pride and Prejudice. Renée Zellweger plays Bridget, a 32-year-old publicity assistant at a London publishing house who starts a diary to quit smoking, drink less and find Mr. Right. She is torn between her charming, womanizing boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a stiff barrister she met at her mother's turkey curry buffet.

Why it fits right now: Because it starts at rock bottom and refuses to be embarrassed about it. Zellweger took the part seriously in ways that never show as effort: she gained 20 pounds, worked on the accent with the coach who had helped Gwyneth Paltrow on Shakespeare in Love, and, at the producers' request, went to work as a trainee in the publicity department of the London publisher Picador. Maguire said she saw in Zellweger a gift for being able to "straddle comedy and emotion," and that's the exact register of week one: you laugh at yourself, and halfway through the laugh it turns into something else. There's a friendship hidden in the making of it too. Maguire is Fielding's close friend, and Bridget's foul-mouthed pal Shazza is reportedly based on her. The movie knows that your friends are the ones who get you through, because the director was one of them.

One scene to look for: The opening titles. Bridget, alone in her flat and getting steadily drunker, sings along to "All By Myself" with total, tragic commitment. It is the most relatable two minutes ever filmed about being newly single, and it gives you permission to have your own version tonight.

2. Waiting to Exhale (1995)

What it is: Forest Whitaker's first feature as a director, adapted from Terry McMillan's bestseller, with McMillan co-writing the script with Ronald Bass. Four friends in the Phoenix area, played by Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon, keep getting let down by men and keep holding each other up. Babyface wrote the score, and the soundtrack, sung entirely by Black women artists, gave Houston a No. 1 hit with "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)."

Why it fits right now: Every breakup has an angry day, and this is the movie for it. Bassett's Bernadine gave up her dream of running a catering business to help her husband build his company. After 11 years of marriage, he tells her he's leaving her for a woman he works with. What she does next is something you will not do, and should not do, which is exactly why it feels so good to watch her do it for you: she burns his car and his clothes, then sells everything else he owns for a dollar apiece. Then the movie does the more important thing: it keeps four women in each other's lives through bad dates and worse news, so none of them has to get through it alone.

One scene to look for: The fire. Bernadine in a white robe, cigarette in hand, walking away from a burning car. Much of her monologue in that scene was improvised by Bassett, and she later told Oprah Winfrey that during the take she felt herself "go into a trance." You can see it. She isn't acting angry. She's somewhere past it, calm as the flames.

3. The Worst Person in the World (2021)

What it is: Joachim Trier's Oslo comedy-drama about Julie (Renate Reinsve), a young woman who keeps changing majors, careers and plans. She settles in with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), an older comic-book artist who is ready for the next stage of life. Then she crashes a stranger's wedding party and meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). Reinsve won the best actress prize at Cannes for it, which is remarkable when you learn her film debut, in Trier's Oslo, August 31st, was a single line of dialogue.

Why it fits right now: Almost every breakup movie is about the one who got left. This is the rare one about the one who leaves, and about the guilt that comes with it. If you ended things and somehow feel worse than if you'd been dumped, the title is going to hit you: it's what you've been calling yourself in the shower. Trier never lets Julie off the hook, but he never stops loving her either, and Aksel is written with so much warmth that you understand both sides. It's a reminder that you can care about someone deeply and still need to go.

One scene to look for: Julie stops time. Everyone in Oslo freezes mid-step, and she runs across the city to a man she shouldn't be running to. There is no CGI. "Everyone just stood still," Trier told Deadline: police stopped the traffic, and the crew had windows of about four minutes for extras to run into the street and freeze. Reinsve, a former competitive swimmer, ran too gracefully at first, so they made her run messier, arms flailing. And locals watching from their windows started coming downstairs to stand still and join in. Trier wanted it to feel like a musical number with wind in her hair, and it does: the most joyful, guilty minute in the film.

4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

What it is: Michel Gondry directs Charlie Kaufman's screenplay about Joel (Jim Carrey), a shy man who discovers that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has paid a company to erase him from her memory. Wounded, he signs up for the same procedure. Halfway through, lying unconscious while technicians delete her from his head, he realizes he wants to keep her.

Why it fits right now: This is the peak of the night, so let it hurt. The idea began with an artist friend of Gondry's, Pierre Bismuth, who wondered how his friends would react if they got a card telling them they'd been erased from his memory. Who hasn't wanted to send that card this week? The movie takes the fantasy completely seriously, then shows you what you'd lose. The memories go in reverse order, starting with their last fight, so at first it looks like relief. Then the happier days start disappearing too, and Joel ends up running through his own head, trying to hide Clementine in memories where she never belonged, even his own childhood.

That's the truth the film understands better than any other breakup movie. You don't get to keep the person, but you don't actually want to lose the years, because those years are part of who you are now. Grief and gratitude turn out to live in the same room.

There's a lovely accident in the order of this list, too. Back in 1960, the heroine of our last film wonders out loud how long it takes to get someone out of your system, and says somebody should invent a pump for it. Forty-four years later, Kaufman invented the pump and showed us why we'd never really want it.

One scene to look for: Joel's very last memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk. As the memory crumbles around them, she tells him to meet her in Montauk. On a rewatch, keep an eye on Winslet's hair: Clementine's color changes with her moods, and it quietly tells you where you are in a timeline Kaufman built to reward repeat viewings. Many of the memory effects were done in the camera rather than on a computer, including forced perspective and oversized props for the kitchen scene where Carrey seems to shrink into a four-year-old. That handmade quality is why it feels like memory and not like science fiction.

5. The Apartment (1960)

What it is: Billy Wilder's comedy about C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a lonely insurance clerk who climbs the corporate ladder by lending his Upper West Side apartment to executives for their affairs. He has a crush on Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the elevator operator, without knowing she is in love with his married boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). It won five Oscars, including Best Picture.

Why it fits right now: Because this is how the night should end: with two heartbroken people being gentle with each other over the holidays. Fran knows exactly what she's doing wrong and can't stop, and MacLaine plays her with a wry, tired humor that every newly single person will recognize. "Why do people have to love people anyway?" she asks. A heads-up: the story passes through one dark Christmas Eve before it gets kinder, and Wilder handles it with real care. After that, the movie becomes a small, funny portrait of someone looking after you while you heal. Lemmon improvised the bit where Bud makes spaghetti and drains it through the strings of a tennis racket, and it's the most romantic thing a person can do for someone who doesn't feel like eating.

One scene to look for: Fran's compact mirror. When Bud notices the glass is cracked, she tells him she likes it that way, because it "makes me look the way I feel." You've seen that compact before, in a different pair of hands, and Bud is about to remember where. Watch Lemmon's face as he does: it says everything without a word. Then stay for the last line of the film, three words long, said over a deck of cards.

That's the night. You laughed, you burned something down (on screen), you forgave yourself a little, you let the big one hurt, and you ended with a card game in a small apartment. The phone can stay face down a while longer. If you're still awake when the credits roll, our movies for when you can't sleep will keep you company until morning. More moods are coming.

And when you're ready for a rewatch of The Apartment, look closely at the office where Bud works: Wilder's designer built that endless sea of desks with forced perspective, using smaller desks and finally children at the back. Heartbreak is like that too. It looks endless, and it's smaller than it seems.