One of the most delightful quirks of the Netflix monolith is its unpredictable habit of surfacing movies that hardly anyone on Earth was expecting to become among the most-watched on the planet mere weeks before their release. Case in point: The Tearsmith, an Italian YA adaptation that debuted a few weeks ago and has been a Netflix chart staple for several weeks. For fans of the book, this probably seems perfectly natural, but for the movie to do so well in other countries, it must have expanded beyond that fanbase – and those viewers might have found a mishmash of tropes that is by turns (occasionally) bewitching and (mostly) bewildering. It’s about a pair of teenage orphans who are adopted into the same family, as flashbacks gradually reveal their shared history of abuse, attraction, and escape into fairy-tale ideas, if not genuine fantasy. So yes, it’s about adopted siblings struggling to hide the fact that they are madly in lust with one another.
At times, the movie appears to be imitating Twilight – pallid complexions; a love triangle where the secondary guy doesn’t stand a chance; a seemingly aloof bad buy who actually loves the meek main girl; even blasting Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” at length in a way that recalls both the identity of Edward Cullen and the of-the-moment Twilight soundtracks – but it incorporates plenty of other gothic and gothic-adjacent along the way, including Harry Potter (orphaned and mistreated child) and Jane Eyre (tortured objection of affection). The upside to this megamix version of sorta-gothic romance is that there are plenty of other movies (besides Twilights and besides any inevitable Tearsmith sequels) that take some the same ideas or vibes in entertaining directions. So, in the spirit of an old-fashioned video store, here’s a virtual shelf with five recommendations for anyone who loved The Tearsmith (or anyone who wanted to love it and came away somewhat baffled).
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This movie emerged from the post-Potter, post-Twilight YA fantasy adaptation boom of the early 2010s. While it’s not nearly as memorable as either of those series (and stopped dead at one installment after flopping at the box office), it stands out for the genuine chemistry between its leads, Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert. Movies like The Tearsmith illustrate that it’s often the relationships and the melodrama that a lot of viewers loved from Twilight, rather than the mythology and lore; Beautiful Creatures at least seems to understand that a romantic story needs sparky charisma, not just three points on a love triangle, to work on screen. The witchy fantasy stuff is forgettable; the romance makes it worthwhile for fans of the genre.
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Despite the title, this isn’t a sequel to Beautiful Creatures; it’s one of the best movies of the ’90s, about to celebrate its 30th anniversary. The Tearsmith doesn’t actually show us much of the fairy tales the orphans have told each other, which gives its dreamier moments a more abstract quality; it’s often more like watching people describe a gothic fantasy than actually experiencing it. Heavenly Creatures follows two young women (Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey) straight into their delusions, with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson actually showing us the fantasy world they become increasingly lost inside as their obsession grows. It’s not a proper romance or adventure, but its darker psychology feels, paradoxically, both more otherworldly and more intensely realistic than a lot of similar movies.
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“Are you brave enough to imagine a fairy tale without a wolf?” Rigel asks Nica in The Tearsmith. Sure, but why would you want to?! Red Riding Hood is brave enough to imagine a fairy tale with a wolf, and turn it into a kind of gothic romance that’s more fun to look at than Twilight – with which it shares director Catherine Hardwicke. Hardwicke isn’t facing as many source-material constrictions here, adapting a public-domain folk tale rather than a beloved bestseller, and makes a solid werewolf picture that could easily stand alongside some of the latter-day Universal Monsters outings. Amanda Seyfried, who knows her way around sincere melodrama, stars in the Red role.
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While The Tearsmith has orphanage flashbacks from the protagonist’s young-adult vantage point, this is an outright children’s story, based on a 1905 novel as well as that book’s 1939 film adaptation. But with director Alfonso Cuarón behind the camera, it’s got plenty of cinematic craft and style (The Tearsmith can only muster some bisexual lighting and slow-mo for a club scene) and takes its young heroine seriously, even when the story itself has plenty of heightened melodrama.
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Going in the opposite direction from A Little Princess, and into more explicit territory than The Tearsmith, this similarly Italy-set coming-of-age romance tackles a different taboo: an age-gapped affair between a teenage boy (Timothée Chalamet) and a visiting adult (Armie Hammer). Despite that, this is more bittersweet and more sophisticated than the discomfiting wish-fulfillment of so much lower-tier YA.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
