10 Taboo Relationship Movies Worth Watching on Netflix This July
Not every love story is supposed to happen. That’s kind of the point of this list. Netflix has quietly built up a decent stash of films where the central relationship is the thing everyone around the characters would tell them to run from — an affair, a forbidden crush, something crossing a line that’s cultural, religious, or just plain illegal. Here’s ten of them, ranked from “worth a watch” to “drop everything.”
10. Black Island (2021)
German thriller, small island setting, and a substitute teacher who takes a very unusual interest in one of her students. It plays out slower than you’d expect — less shock value, more dread building underneath the surface — and by the time you realize what she’s actually after, it’s too late for the kid to see it coming.
9. Two (2021)
Two strangers wake up stitched together, literally, with zero memory of how it happened. Sounds gimmicky on paper. It mostly isn’t. One of them suspects her controlling husband is behind it, and the film spends its runtime chipping away at who’s lying and who’s just scared.
8. Flowers in the Attic (2014)
This one’s been adapted a few times, but the Netflix version sticks close to the source material — four kids locked away in an attic by a mother who’d rather they didn’t exist. Two of the siblings grow closer than siblings should as the years drag on. Uncomfortable by design.
7. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2022)
The D.H. Lawrence novel got banned outright when it first came out, so it’s fitting the story still feels a little dangerous a century later. A wealthy, paralyzed husband basically pushes his wife toward an affair for the sake of an heir — she falls for the groundskeeper instead, and it becomes about a lot more than sex.
6. Rebecca (2020)
A young woman marries into old money and moves into a house still haunted, emotionally if not literally, by her husband’s dead first wife. The taboo thread here is buried a little deeper in the plot — turns out Rebecca’s relationship with her own cousin wasn’t exactly innocent either.
5. 365 Days (2020)
You’ve probably already heard about this one, mostly because people can’t agree on whether it’s romantic or genuinely alarming. A woman gets kidnapped by a mafia boss who gives himself a year to make her fall in love with him. Consent is basically the whole controversy — worth knowing going in.
4. You Can Live Forever (2022)
Quieter than most on this list, and honestly better for it. Two teenage girls fall for each other inside a Jehovah’s Witness community where that kind of love isn’t allowed to exist. It’s less about scandal and more about how much it costs to want something your whole world says is wrong.
3. Benedetta (2021)
Paul Verhoeven doesn’t do subtle, and this one’s no exception — a nun in a 17th-century Italian convent starts having religious visions right around the time she falls for another woman inside the same walls. Whether the visions are real ends up mattering less than what they protect her from.
2. Bulbbul (2020)
Set in 1880s Bengal, this is part ghost story, part slow-burn tragedy about a woman and her husband’s younger brother, who she’d grown far too close to as a child. There’s a folklore element running alongside it — something in the village is killing husbands who beat their wives — and the two threads meet in a genuinely satisfying way.
1. Faithfully Yours (2022)
Top spot goes to this Dutch thriller, and it earns it. Two married women, best friends, sneak off for a weekend to cheat on their husbands without anyone finding out. Then one of them turns up dead. What follows isn’t really about the affair anymore — it’s about how far the surviving friend will go to keep her secrets buried along with the body.
Ten films, ten different ways of asking the same question: what happens when wanting something outweighs knowing you shouldn’t. Pick one, or work your way down the list — either way, you’re in for a weekend of uncomfortable, compelling television.
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