The traditional rom-com has been on life support for the last decade, and that’s a shame — but the concept of boy-meets-girl lives on, albeit with a genre makeover, at this year’s SXSW. The festival’s buzziest films each flip age-old tales of romance on their head, dropping love stories into horror-infused gore, trippy science fiction, and offbeat fantasy. It’s the kind of genre-mashing that truly never gets old: even when the story is flawed, it still offers us plenty to fall in love with.
The most surprising hits of SXSW each took the concept of love and remixed it in their own perverse ways, so here are the films that honored that premise — for better or worse.
