Five Netflix movies to watch if you loved ‘Me Before You’
This might feel like stating the obvious, but we strongly believe that nobody, ever, fully recovers from Me Before You. And not because of the ending, but because of the little heartfelt moments this masterpiece gave us and yet wrecked us for life. No wonder it’s back in the Netflix charts.
And it’s not when Lou showed up in those striped tights or when Will smiled like he was already gone. Not when that letter hit, and it didn’t scream or beg or explain. It just sat there, saying everything none of us wanted to hear. This film truly ruins you forever.
It’s been years, and yet that film lives rent-free in the back of my mind like it has no intention of leaving. You try to rewatch it, thinking maybe this time you won’t fall apart. Maybe this time you will be stronger. But no. It destroys you… again. Same beach, same music, same last look and the same old tears.
Seems like Netflix viewers are loving this a bit too much and have decided to throw themselves into the vein of this movie once again, as it is still trending in the global Top 10 movies. If anything, it has climbed up from being at number six to number three now. And in all fairness, nobody’s blaming them.
So if you are still in the same space as Me Before You, craving something that understands what that film did to you, these five Netflix movies might just hit close. Not because they are the same, but because they get it.
Five Netflix movies to watch if you loved ‘Me Before You’
Then Barbara Met Alan (Bruce Goodison, Amit Sharma, 2022)
The film begins with Barbara meeting Alan at an open mic night. She is onstage, furious while is in the crowd, listening. The start of a classic love story or at least what looks like one. We see a disabled cabaret performer and a punk rocker falling into a relationship that is just as raw as the fight they are about to lead. Then Barbara Met Alan is based on a true story, and the film shows it beautifully. A good thing about this film is that the directors didn’t change the script for impact.
But the film isn’t your usual romantic drama; it is about protests. About falling in love while smashing windows and rewriting the law. Barbara and Alan are real people who changed the UK’s disability rights landscape, but this film doesn’t let you forget that activism costs everything. It consumes their lives, their relationship, their bodies. And by the time they break apart, you almost forget they ever had a beginning.
Six Years (Hannah Fidell, 2015)
Six Years is a film you expect to be a comparatively soft watch. In Me Before You, Lou and Will taught you how painful it is to love someone you can’t hold onto. And this movie, it goes a step further and takes you directly into a brutal heartbreak. Melanie and Dan have been together forever, but that is exactly the problem; they don’t know where the relationship ends and where they begin.
It starts with a dented car turning into something totally different. These two are young and scared. And they are holding on to their bond so tight they forget how to breathe. You feel the tension build in every half-apology they give each other. This movie is a breakup, and it’s not a clean one. It is the horrible kind. The one we have all dreaded to be a part of. And just like in Me Before You, you sit there, knowing love is not always enough.
Someone Great (Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, 2019)
On paper, Someone Great is a breakup comedy. You have music, drugs, dancing, and best friends yelling “You deserve better!” in New York bathrooms. th beginning of every 2000 rom-com. But this film hides something else underneath all that. In short, Someone Great is a grief film. Not the one where someone dies but where love walks out, fully alive, and you still have to bury it.
Jenny has just been dumped by the man she thought she’d marry. She is leaving town in a few days. And this is her last hurrah. One last fun day with her two best friends, pretending she is okay. But we all know the flashbacks we get before we leave something familiar, be it an apartment or a city. This is some heavy nostalgia, and it only makes things worse. And that’s the twist: sometimes the worst breakups are the ones where nothing really went wrong… except time.
Blue Jay (Mark Duplass, 2016)
If you have made it this far in the list, that means you clearly are looking for a heartbreak. And nothing, literally nothing, prepares you for the silence in Blue Jay. Jim and Amanda bump into each other in a grocery store. They used to be everything. Now they are strangers pretending not to shake. Blue Jay is black and white and barely an hour long. But it contains more unsaid emotion than most three-hour stories.
They go for coffee, and they talk. They laugh in that nervous, awkward way people do when they know they are too far gone to fix it. And then they go back to his childhood home, and time starts folding in on itself. You don’t realise what they are circling until they say it. And when they finally do, the grief feels like it’s personal. It is about the version of your life that almost happened and the person who remembers it exactly the way you do.
All My Life (Marc Meyers, 2020)
You already know it is not going to end the way you want. All My Life is a story of Solomon and Jenn, who are planning their wedding when all of a sudden he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. But don’t worry, the film doesn’t rush to the tragedy; it lets them build something first. Something good. Something worth mourning.
Once he is diagnosed, they get through treatments and fundraisers and vows written too early. It doesn’t ask you to watch a death. It asks you to watch a marriage happen anyway in borrowed time, with borrowed joy. It’s like they are squeezing a whole lifetime into what little they have left.