Toxic Relationships in ‘The Loved Ones’

For most, Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate romance and love—a chance to shower your partner with gifts and chocolate and expensive candlelit dinners. For horror fans, Valentine’s Day is the perfect opportunity to watch a romance-themed horror movie. Whether it’s the perennially underrated My Bloody Valentine (1981), the fittingly melodramatic Valentine (2001), or of course, new killer on the block, Heart Eyes (2025), there’s no shortage of slashers that fit the bill to get your Valentine’s hearts pumping. For my money though, I like to turn to Sean Byrne’s 2009 flick of kidnapping and torture, The Loved Ones.

Six months following the tragic car accident that took his father’s life, Brent (Xavier Samuel, Road Train, Bait) is on a bit of a spiral. The only one that seems to be keeping him together is his girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine, Gone). His plans to take Holly to prom are complicated though when Lola (Robin McLeavy, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) asks him instead. He says no, but Lola doesn’t take kindly to rejection.

After Brent is unceremoniously drugged and kidnapped by Lola’s father (John Brumpton), he wakes up around her family's dinner table, haphazardly decorated into a makeshift prom. While the family-led torture film has been done before (to great effect) in films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Mother's Day (1980), The Loved Ones breaks new ground by having the family ringleader be, not grown men or a “psycho-biddy” figure, but a teenage girl, dressed in pink and wearing a paper crown. McLeavy’s performance as Lola is commanding and terrifying, effortlessly swinging between shy, lovestruck girl and ruthless, malevolent matriarch, seen especially when she interacts with her lobotomized mother, Bright Eyes (Anne Scott-Pendlebury).

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Lola's insistence that she loves Brent is undermined—apart from the fact that she is brutally torturing him, of course—by her admission that Brent is the latest in a long line of lovers that she has, with the help of her father, kidnapped in the same way. For Lola, each of her “relationships” is a one-way street, her girlhood crushes an exercise in power and control. Each disposable fling she has with her “frogs,” as she calls Brent at one point, brings her one step closer to finding her prince; the only man in her life who not only enables her abusive behavior, but encourages and participates in it—her father.

But where Lola is obsessed with physically and emotionally dominating her date, Brent’s friend Jamie’s (Richard Wilson) more passive attempt at wooing his own date Mia (Jessica McNamee) is equally as troublesome. Mia, the police sergeant’s daughter, has a self-destructive habit that makes Brent’s look tame by comparison. After accepting an astonished Jamie’s invite to the dance, the couple spend much of the dance in the parking lot. Mia drains a bottle of vodka and smokes joint after joint; Jamie only starting to look concerned, or at least, uncomfortable.

Robin McLeavy in The Loved Ones, image via IMDB

When they finally do exit the car, Mia has trouble standing on her own. When Jamie offers his hand, she pushes him away, uninterested. Finally inside the dance, they’re quickly ejected when Mia is caught groping a (once again) visibly uncomfortable Jamie on the dance floor. In the car once again, Mia aggressively comes onto Jamie and they have sex. After Jamie brings her home, Mia cries herself to sleep, rhetorically asking her father why he can’t find her brother whose disappearance seems to have initiated this extreme behavior.

Mia’s efforts at self-destruction come from her attempts at enacting some semblance of control in a life that she sees as chaotic. Her parents can’t keep her and her brother safe; hell, a police officer living in the house couldn’t do that. Jamie wouldn't stand up to her—neither in the school dance nor in his car when her inebriation was clearly behind her advances. The only power she has in her life is that over her own body, for better or worse.

Contrasted against Lola's sociopathy, Mia's misguided inward search for control could almost be missed. It's a subplot that takes a circuitous route back to the main plot and Lola's intensity constantly threatens to overshadow Mia's significance to the film's themes. But Mia, in a way, gives us a mirror image of Lola—her battle for control may be directed at herself but it is still toxic, still damaging. Both girls have been failed by the figures in their lives tasked with raising them and keeping them safe. 

The Loved Ones paints a pretty depressing portrait of control dynamics in relationships. Even the title itself is a bastardization of the phrase’s common meaning. “The loved ones” here emphasizes the lack of reciprocation from its subjects, and in fact, mocks the word “love” at all. Lola’s “loved ones” were never really loved at all—not by her, at least—but were toy soldiers to be beaten, maimed, and ultimately, discarded into her cellar, dependent and subservient to their “princess” above. 

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Article by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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