Who Said Romance Is Dead?
Two Ugly People in the Context of Australian Cinema by Peter Skinner
When I think of Australian cinema, the images that spring to mind are often rugged landscapes, gritty crime dramas, serial killers, off-beat comedies or intimate slices of working-class life. We are a nation whose cinematic identity has long been forged in the fires of outback myths, suburban realism, comedic caricatures and stories of survival against harsh environments, both physical and emotional. Romance, by contrast, has often been a rarity. The love story, as a central dramatic engine, has never occupied the same place in Australia as it has in American, European, or Asian cinema.
This is not to say that love is absent from our screens. Rather, it tends to emerge at the margins, folded into the sub-plots of coming-of-age tales, family dramas, or tragic narratives. When Australian films do tackle romance head-on, they often do so with a particular kind of intensity: love as fleeting, bruised, or precarious. That scarcity makes each attempt at the genre feel like part of an ongoing conversation about what romance means in the Australian context. Into that space comes Two Ugly People, a film that refuses to treat love as cliché, instead shaping it as an existential meditation on anonymity, longing, and the possibility of truly encountering another person.
The soul of Two Ugly People is captured in the films opening line:
It is a sentence at once haunting and simple. In a world saturated with information, where every encounter seems already mediated by history, social media, or shared connections. The idea of being truly unknown to someone is almost impossible. We carry our ghosts, our baggage, our past selves into every meeting. Strangeness, once the natural condition of human encounter, has become precious and rare.
The film takes this rarity as its subject. Its two characters, both carrying bruises invisible and visible, find themselves in a remote Australian motel, living within a fantasy. Their romance is not one of flowers and courtship, but of suspended time, where the state of strangeness becomes the ground on which intimacy can grow. The motel is both nowhere and everywhere, a liminal space in which their anonymity can be tested, fractured, and finally transformed.
In carving out this space, Two Ugly People draws from a global lineage of films where love is inseparable from mood, memory, and identity. Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is perhaps the clearest antecedent, with its languid sense of time, its focus on what is unsaid, and its portrayal of love as an aching space between bodies rather than a tidy resolution. Like Wong’s film, Two Ugly People lingers in the silences, the glances, in the spaces where desire is both restrained and amplified.
In The Mood for Love - 2000 (Dir: Wong Kar-wai)
Two Ugly People - 2025 (Dir: Peter Skinner)
There is also Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, in which love is tied to haunting and loss, to deserts and motel rooms that hold the residue of absence. The long tracking shots and melancholic landscapes of Wenders’ America echo in the Australian motel corridors of Two Ugly People, where love becomes less about possession and more about recognition, about seeing the other across an opulent rural Chinese restaurant in silence.
Paris, Texas - 1984 (Dir: Wim Wenders)
Two Ugly People - 2025 (Dir: Peter Skinner)
Like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, the film inherits the idea of connection formed in liminality. Two people adrift in a space that belongs to neither of them, finding something genuine in the temporary. In Coppola’s film it is Tokyo; here it is an Australian nowhere. The transience is what gives that connection its meaning.
Lost in Translation - 2003 (Dir: Sophia Coppola)
Two Ugly People - 2025 (Dir: Peter Skinner)
There is an echo of ghosts between the walls. The dreamlike dislocations of Last Year at Marienbad, where memory and fantasy blur until one cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. As in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where romance is tangled with projection, identity, and the slippery instability of desire. Two Ugly People stands in conversation with these films, not imitating but participating in their lineage. Cinema that pushes romance to the forefront, treating it as a state of mind, as an unstable threshold between selves.
Last Year at Marienbad - 1961 (Dir: Alain Resnais)
Two Ugly People - 2025 (Dir: Peter Skinner)
Vertigo - 1958 (Dir: Alfred Hitchcock)
Two Ugly People - 2025 (Dir: Peter Skinner)
Within the Australian context, the lineage is shorter but no less powerful. Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth offered a raw, electric vision of young love interrupted by mortality, brimming with the intensity of first connection. Goran Stolevski’s Of an Age captured the queer experience of fleeting intimacy, set against the specificity of Melbourne’s suburbs in the early 2000s. Neil Armfields’s Candy showed love consumed by addiction, torn apart by the very intensity that made it beautiful. And Cate Shortland’s Somersault traced a young woman’s tentative steps into love and sexuality in the cold landscapes of Jindabyne.
These films are few, and far between. They represent Australian cinema daring to step into the emotional terrain of longing and intimacy. Two Ugly People joins this conversation with it’s own unique tonal register. A film that positions itself as a romance not just of bodies but of identities. A story where chosen anonymity itself becomes the stage for desire, and by doing so, it broadens the scope of what Australian cinematic romance can be.
What makes Two Ugly People distinct is its refusal to sentimentalise romance regardless of it’s, at times, operatic construction. This is not a love story where characters are perfected in each other’s eyes. Instead, they are haunted, awkward, bruised. Their beauty lies in their strangeness, their refusal to conform to cinematic ideals of the romantic couple, despite their desire to do so.
The motel setting reinforces this. It is a place outside of time, suspended between arrivals and departures, where everyone is both at home and not at home. Within that liminality, the two characters construct their deepest fantasy: of living inside anonymity. The film takes seriously the idea that to be a stranger is itself erotic, that desire begins not with knowledge but with the thrill of not knowing.
Stylistically, the film leans into atmosphere. Long takes, vibrant colour palettes, and silences that stretch just beyond comfort. Music functions like memory, surfacing grand emotions without dictating them. The result is a cinematic experience closer to a dream, hypnosis, than a plot-driven drama.
In this way, Two Ugly People brings something rare to Australian cinema: a romantic film that is not afraid of strangeness, not afraid of silence, not afraid of being unresolved. It insists that intimacy can be found in ambiguity, that romance is not always about arrival but about dwelling in the in-between.
In positioning itself within both global and Australian traditions, Two Ugly People shows how romance in cinema can still surprise, still haunt, still feel new. Its focus on strangers, not lovers, not partners, not star-crossed fates, as it reorients the genre toward what is most rare in contemporary life: the possibility of encountering someone without preconception, without baggage, without history, or at least trying to.
In the end, Two Ugly People isn’t just a love story. It’s a story about the rarity of being strangers, and how that rarity can be the most romantic yet haunting thing of all.
Two Ugly People - 2025 (Dir: Peter Skinner)