The Most Uncomfortable Age Gaps In Movies

They say "all you need is love." They also say "age is just a number." But every so often when you're watching a movie, you see a mismatched couple (or at least one lovestruck stalker) taking things a bit too far. When it comes to cinematic relationships, sometimes the number of birthdays really does matter, and we get more than a little weirded out now when we see these uncomfortable age gaps in movies.

For the most part, fortunately, not all of these lopsided and wildly inappropriate relationships are portrayed with a blissful lack of self-awareness. The ones that are, in fact, often come from earlier eras in both society and filmmaking, when the age differences shown in the films of the time were simply taken at face value. Luckily, the times have changed: the vast majority of movies that feature such relationships nowadays will document them as the destructive, predatory, unhealthy situations that they truly are — with any attempts by the characters to put some kind of rationalization or justification on them seen as delusional at best and tragic at worst. 

Of course, there are still exceptions even in modern times, and we'll get to a few of those as well. Either way, the movies and the age gaps we examine below are certain to make you squirm — now that we see them with clarity.

With its famous keyboard scene and great Tom Hanks performance, it's no wonder "Big" is considered a comedy classic. Directed by Penny Marshall, this 1988 flick follows a young kid named Josh (David Moscow) who morphs into a 30-year-old man. At first, this magical transformation seems pretty cool, especially when Josh is paid big bucks to play with toys for a living. But things get problematic when he starts dating Susan (Elizabeth Perkins), his adult coworker.

True, Hanks and Perkins are about the same age in real life, but in the movie, Josh is just 13. So when the two end up sleeping together, we're witnessing a serious felony offense. This illegal relationship has prompted some people to label "Big" the "creepiest story ever told" or describe the film as a celebration of "unrepentant pedophilia." While that sounds harsh, you've got to admit it's creepy at the end when Josh reverts back to his child form, and Susan waves goodbye to her 13-year-old ex.

Directed by future "The Zone of Interest" filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, "Birth" is a pretty divisive movie that was greeted with an avalanche of jeers and catcalls when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Mainstream audiences weren't super happy, either. After all, the film follows an upper-class widow (Nicole Kidman) who's convinced that a 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) is actually the reincarnation of her husband.

At first, she's a little reluctant to believe this kid is her lost love, but as the film goes on, not only do Kidman and the kid share a kiss, they even spend a few minutes sitting in the bath together. Granted, Jonathan Glazer didn't intend for this to be salacious. Instead, he wanted to make a film about "the idea of eternal love." Still, anytime you've got a full-grown woman making eyes at a prepubescent boy, your film is probably going to bomb big time at the box office.

A major box office flop at the time but now widely hailed as a fantasy cult classic, 1986's "Labyrinth" is mostly famous for two things: David Bowie and David Bowie's, um, bulge. As The Washington Post put it oh-so delicately, you can make out quite a bit of anatomy thanks to the singer's "over-revelatory spandex." With all that male charisma onscreen, it's easy to see why so many people have said "Labyrinth" was the movie that kickstarted their sexual awakening.

Now, that's all fine and good ... but then you've got to remember that Bowie's character, Jareth the Goblin King, is actively pursuing a 15-year-old girl (played by a 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly). In fact, he drugs her, tries to seduce her, and begs her to "do as I say, and I will be your slave." It's a bit intense for a kid's film, to say the least, although it's nowhere near as freaky as that cackling junk lady. No matter what, it wouldn't fly today, classic or not.

Directed by Luc Besson, 1994's "Leon: The Professional" is a movie that will leave you feeling a little odd. It's an awesome film, but while the relationship between Jean Reno's Leon and Natalie Portman's Mathilda isn't "inappropriate" per se, it is just a tad ... disconcerting.

The plot involves a 12-year-old girl (Portman) who asks a hitman (Reno) to get revenge on the psychotic DEA agent (Gary Oldman) who murdered her family. Leon and Mathilda's relationship starts off strange — he's childlike, she's wise for her years — and only gets weirder from there, especially when she starts crushing on Leon, dressing up as Madonna, and telling strangers this full-grown man is her lover.

It's been pointed out that Leon comes to love Mathilda — but not like that. The assassin never really deals with the situation in a mature way, but then, he's also training her to become a killer, so maybe he's not the best father figure in the world either.

In England, the age of consent is 16, so while the age gap at the center of "An Education" is technically legal, that doesn't make it any less unsettling. In this 2009 film written by Nick Hornby (based on the memoirs of journalist Lynn Barber), 24-year-old Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a teenage cellist who can't wait to leave her little London neighborhood. As Jenny grows more and more restless, who should arrive but David (Peter Sarsgaard), a 30-something smooth-talker with no scruples about getting involved with a 16-year-old.

Over the course of the film, David teaches Jenny all about high society, sex, and eventually, deception. As Roger Ebert described him, David is "a rotter, a bounder, a cad, a dirty rotten scoundrel. But you can't get far in any of those trades if you're not also a charmer." Fortunately, Jenny eventually realizes this guy is a wolf in 1960s clothing, and she walks away from David a little older, a little wiser, and — you guessed it — a little more educated.

It's a sad fact that Peter O'Toole — one of Hollywood's greatest actors — never won an Academy Award (honorary ones don't really count), even though he was nominated eight times. His final nomination came for the 2006 movie "Venus," in which O'Toole plays Maurice Russell, an aging actor in his 70s who looks like death warmed over.

But things take a turn for Maurice when he's introduced to his (brace yourself) friend's niece's teenage daughter (future "Doctor Who" star Jodie Whittaker). As critic Seongyong Cho put it at RogerEbert.com, Maurice is a "fabulous dirty old man," and while he's physically incapable of getting it on, that's not going to prevent him from spending time with a pretty girl.

Of course, Whittaker's character isn't sexually interested in Maurice, but as the film progresses, the two do form a sort of bond, regardless of their whopping age gap. It's kind of sweet, but also frankly kind of skeevy, and proof that O'Toole is one of the greatest actors who never took home an Oscar.

You could describe the title character of 1995's "Mr. Holland's Opus" (Richard Dreyfuss) as a frustrated guy. Sure, deep down in his heart, he loves teaching kids about music, but he only got the gig to make ends meet. His "real" goal in life is to compose classical music, but that's not working out so well. Things at home aren't that great either, as he's growing distant from his wife and struggling with the fact that his son was born deaf. 

So when a gorgeous student (Jean Louisa Kelly, who also appeared in "Uncle Buck") auditions for his upcoming Gershwin revue, well, middle-aged Mr. Holland suddenly gets his groove back. The girl serves as his musical muse, but the situation gets trickier when the clearly twitterpated student asks her gray-haired teacher to run off with her to New York. Being a good dude, Mr. Holland gently turns her down ... but you can tell he was totally considering it for just a second.

When asked by the folks at Coming Soon if she ever worried about appearing in movies like "The Reader," a film about statutory rape, Kate Winslet replied, "I've got to tell you, I'm so offended by that ... To me, that is absolutely not this story at all. That boy knows exactly what he's doing."

With all due respect to the Oscar winner, that excuse wouldn't fly in a court of law. And if we want to get technical, "The Reader" is totally about statutory rape ... and Nazis.

The film follows 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross), who gets involved with 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). When the two aren't making love, he's constantly reading to her (she's illiterate), thus the title of the movie. But their affair takes a nosedive when Michael discovers Hanna used to work as a concentration camp guard. In other words, this just might be the unhealthiest relationship on this entire list for reasons that have nothing to do with age.

Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" is almost unanimously hailed as one of the best novels of the 20th century, but it's not what you'd call light reading. Sure, the writing is beautiful, but the subject matter is a bit on the dark side. Nevertheless, the novel inspired two separate movies, Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version, starring James Mason and Sue Lyon, and Adrian Lyne's 1997 adaptation, featuring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.

Both movies focus on Humbert Humbert (Mason, Irons), a middle-aged professor who finds himself inappropriately attracted to young girls. He sets his sights on the titular Lolita (Lyon, Swain), renting a room in the boarding house where she lives with her mother. When Lolita's mother dies after discovering Humbert's attraction to her daughter, Humbert can finally act on his desires. Both Lyon and Swain were in their early teens when cast in their respective roles, and naturally, the subject matter stirred up some controversy. Of course, it's not like Humbert is supposed to be a hero — and don't worry, he eventually figures what the term "jailbait" really means.

When it comes to May/December relationships, there's no couple quite so eerie as Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and Joe Gillis (William Holden). In this Billy Wilder classic, Joe is a screenwriter who runs into Norma, a fading starlet, completely by accident. But once he steps inside her mansion, there's no getting away. Norma is like a spider, and Joe is the fly. Of course, so long as she's paying for his suits and keeping him comfortable, he can't really complain much.

Norma is about 50, and Joe is half her age (Holden was 32 when he played the role). However, the actress is completely lost in the past. Her dusty mansion is a shrine to her faded career, and she spends her evenings watching her own movies from Hollywood's silent era. In other words, Norma might still have a few birthdays left, but she feels absolutely ancient. As Roger Ebert pointed out, Norma "has aged not in the flesh but in the mind," and when Joe decides it's time to date someone his own age, he discovers you can't walk away from a movie star that easily.

There's thorny, and then there's 1988's "Kung-Fu Master!," a film in which the great Agnès Varda directs her own teenage son Mathieu Demy in a story that has his character live out an affair with a woman played by the very adult Jane Birkin. Conceived on-camera by Birkin during the filming of the legendary 1988 documentary "Jane B. par Agnès V.," the film is just what it says on the tin: A romance — structurally and nominally, albeit far from sincere — between the 40-year-old Mary-Jane (Birkin) and the 15-year-old Julien, a classmate of Mary-Jane's daughter (Charlotte Gainsbourg) with whom she develops a seemingly inexplicable obsession.

Even though the film is persistently aware of how twisted and damaging such a predatory relationship would inevitably be even at its breeziest, Varda makes a point of sidestepping mere judgment. Instead, she seeks to understand and deconstruct Mary-Jane, asking just what it is that a grown woman could possibly be getting out of a "relationship" that reduces her to scouting arcade cafés for possible date spots. Although the tone is deceptively sunny as in much of Varda's darkest oeuvre, swirling under the surface are knotty themes like adult dysfunctionality, cultural chauvinism, toxic nostalgia, the twilight of the sexual revolution, and even the toll of the HIV/AIDS epidemic — all expressed through a "love story" that's really anything but.

Whether in comic, cinematic, or animated form, "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" is one of those pieces of media that just seems cursed to be chronically misunderstood by audiences. Not only do some viewers of the 2010 live-action Edgar Wright film relate uncritically to the titular character and fail to see how much his selfishness harms the people around him, but a lot of people believe the movie itself has that same attitude. Which is far from the case — as demonstrated by the way "Scott Pilgrim" depicts Scott's (Michael Cera) utterly imbalanced relationship with Knives Chau (Ellen Wong).

The problem starts with the age gap: While Scott is a 22-year-old for whom adulthood has long since reared its head, Knives is a 17-year-old high school student who idolizes Scott. Then there's the corollary to that problem: Because Scott is sheltered and emotionally arrested, he believes he can pass himself off as being on Knives' maturity level, even as all his bandmates, his sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick), and his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin) insist that he's being delusional. Unsurprisingly, he shrugs off Knives' feelings after falling for Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), blithely cheats on both girls simultaneously, and then discards Knives the moment it's convenient for him. It takes the whole movie for both Scott and Knives to understand the extent to which he has taken advantage of her throughout their relationship. Thankfully, the movie itself is never less than sharply aware of that.

Risky, lurid, and campy like so few mainstream movies allow themselves to be nowadays, Richard Eyre's "Notes on a Scandal" is among the few truly memorable psychological thrillers of the 2000s. Its appeal largely comes down to the sheer juiciness of its premise: Lonely, embittered, misanthropic elderly teacher Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) develops an obsessive infatuation with her younger new colleague Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett, easily giving one of her 12 best performances ever).

The depiction of elderly queer sexuality in such frontal, abrasive terms is striking enough, and to be sure, the age gap between Barbara and Sheba is pretty alarming for a one-sided attraction. But the really disturbing age gap that the movie hinges on is the one between Sheba and her 15-year-old student Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson).

The 2006 film depicts that "relationship" as properly catastrophic — a dangerous, destructive compulsion that Sheba can't seem to let go of. Ingeniously, it also makes perfect fodder for a moral tennis match between herself and Barbara. At first, Barbara has the high ground, merely harboring an attraction that does not, in and of itself, hurt anybody, whereas Sheba is being actively predatory; Barbara then tries to use Sheba's secret to manipulate and exploit her, and things get increasingly murkier — and uglier, and more sordid, and more desperate — from there. It's discomfort as the ideal fuel for vicious entertainment. They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Not only is the "age gap" in Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" uncomfortable, but it's genuinely bizarre, and difficult to even wrap one's head around. The whole premise of the 2023 film is that eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has transplanted the brain of a newborn into the body of an adult woman, thus creating Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who is neither entirely one nor the other. Bella speeds much more quickly than a toddler through each developmental stage — which doesn't make it less discomfiting when she becomes aware of her body's fully mature sexual functions, and charges right into that aspect of life by initiating an affair with the smooth scoundrel Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).

Although Duncan is not privy to the precise nature of Bella, he understands that she's different from other humans, thinking and behaving more like a young teenager at the time they meet. Indeed, this is what attracts him to her: Duncan idealizes and exploits Bella's naiveté, purity, and lack of shame, introducing her to sex in all its variety while insisting she must avoid developing feelings for him. The discomfort inspired by their tryst is very much intentional; at first, it appears as though Duncan is treating Bella like his personal plaything. Then, as the movie progresses and Bella keeps maturing at a stunning clip, she outgrows Duncan entirely, the scope of her sexual interests extends beyond him, and he is turned into a jealous, sobbing, shrieking, possessive, pathetic mess.

Josh and Benny Safdie are no strangers to building movies around blinkered, destructive characters whose attempts to fix their own messes only lead to more chaos and anguish for themselves and others. But even by their standards, Constantine "Connie" Nikas (Robert Pattinson) in 2017's "Good Time" is a tough pill to swallow. Although the plot follows Connie's efforts to free his cognitively disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) from police custody after a bank robbery gone awry, it soon becomes clear that Connie's always acting strictly out of self-interest, even when "looking out" for Nick. Critics at the time were impressed by Pattinson's ability to throw himself so fearlessly into such an ugly, abrasive, unsympathetic role.

Connie's amoral, weaselly antics seemingly reach a low point every other scene, but it's hard to beat what he does to Crystal (Taliah Lennice Webster), the 16-year-old granddaughter of the elderly woman (Gladys Mathon) whose house he's crashing in for the night. First, to distract Crystal while TV news is reporting him as a fugitive, he initiates a makeout session with her, which is nauseating enough given that he's an adult man. Then, taking advantage of her attraction to him, Connie ropes Crystal into assisting him in a new plan, which ends with her being arrested while Connie watches indifferently, having gotten away scot-free thanks to his white privilege. It's a veritable highway pileup of jerkassery — the moment when Connie's scheming turns decisively from gripping to revolting to watch.

Much like "Poor Things," William Dieterle's "Portrait of Jennie" tells the story of a young woman who's growing up — both physically and mentally, in this case — much faster than would seem to be possible under non-fantastical circumstances. And, much like "Memoirs of a Geisha," "Portrait of Jennie" features a love story that begins as an adult-child interaction, later blossoming into romance once both parties are all grown up. If those two ideas are individually disquieting in their own ways, their combination turns out to be even weirder to watch: Effectively, Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) falls in love with someone he got to know as a little girl.

Sure, it could be argued that Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones) is no ordinary little girl. Her mysterious time-traveling ability suggests that she either ages completely differently from other humans, or ages normally in a context that makes her interactions with Eben singular. Whatever the case, the genesis of their love story happens right when they first meet, with Jennie still as a child, yet rattling Eben enough to inspire him to sketch her; by their second encounter, Eben is head over heels. To pretend the film doesn't see anything absurd about that initial age difference would be to deny it the intoxicating emotional strangeness that makes it a classic; at the same time, it's hard not to be nagged by a feeling that maybe people in 1948 weren't alarmed enough by the assignment of allure to little girls.

Even after so many filmmakers across the decades have vowed to leave no taboo unturned and explore the deepest, darkest recesses of what cinematic storytelling can depict, mother-son incest remains a topic vanishingly few movies ever dare to broach. In the case of something like "Womb," it's hard to say if the out-there sci-fi framing makes the whole thing more or less weird: On one hand, Thomas (Matt Smith) is not really Rebecca's (Eva Green) biological son, but a clone of her late husband whom she gestated and raised. On the other hand ... well, reread the previous sentence.

What makes 2010's "Womb" so disquieting, actually, is that Rebecca insists on treating the whole bizarre situation with as much of a sense of normality as possible — she never tells Thomas the truth as he's growing up, endeavors to think of him as her son, and does her best to shield him from the prejudice that "copies" face in their futuristic society. Adding to the dissonance is the fact that Rebecca appears to be ageless, for reasons which are never really explained. But then Thomas reaches the age that his originator was when he died, brings a girlfriend (Hannah Murray) home, and stirs tempestuous jealousy in his mother — at which point "Womb" crosses so many lines at once that it's hard to even keep up.

Helen Mirren's screen breakthrough happened in 1969's "Age of Consent," one of the very last films directed by legendary British filmmaker Michael Powell — and one of his few notable ones without the involvement of Emeric Pressburger in any capacity. Loosely based on the autobiography of Australian graphic artist Norman Lindsay, "Age of Consent" tells of Bradley Morahan (James Mason), an elderly artist going through a shortage of inspiration and drive, who travels to a small island off the Australian shore to find his muse again. Which he does — in the literal, physical form of Cora Ryan (Mirren), an unruly local teenage girl.

At first, Bradley pays Cora to pose for him, and the relationship that develops between them remains strictly platonic even as Cora strips nude to model. She's clearly attracted to him, but whether he reciprocates her feelings is left up in the air. Eventually, Cora's grandmother Ma (Neva Carr Glyn) correctly calls out Bradley for fostering an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl, but he defends himself by saying they didn't do anything sexual. It's not until the film's final moments that Bradley takes Cora seriously as a possible sexual partner, and this "acceptance" of her interest in him is framed as a romantic breakthrough. Mirren was 22 when she was cast, which makes things marginally less creepy than if she were her character's age — but it still makes her pining for the 60-year-old Mason look just plain silly.

The most shocking thing about 2023's "Last Summer" is how non-shocking it is, at least in presentation. We're talking, after all, about Catherine Breillat — French cinema's great master of provocation and taboo-breaking in the past quarter-century, responsible for countless disturbing movie scenes that went too far. Then again, perhaps this is exactly what Breillat was angling for in her most recent film: A subliminal nightmare, initially disguised behind a façade of romantic languor. It's certainly her most visually and formally accessible film — almost something that could pass for an amiable romantic comedy in the international section of Prime Video, if it weren't for the whole "stepmother-stepson affair" thing.

As if eager to clarify her stance after putting her foot in her mouth regarding the #MeToo movement in 2018, Breillat brings her entire arsenal to the story of Anne (Léa Drucker), a successful and respected Parisian lawyer with a happy family, who risks it all by embarking on a torrid affair with her 17-year-old stepson Théo (Samuel Kircher). What at first seems like a complex sexual dynamic with an oscillating power balance soon reveals itself to be an act of full-blown exploitation on Anne's part, as she resorts to the entire breadth of her social, legal, and emotional muscle to secure her advantage over Théo when things begin to turn awry and life-ruining for both. It's a deliberate, deceptive, and ultimately gut-wrenching film about the forests that passion's fire can consume.

You probably best know Jenna Ortega as either the title character from the Netflix series "Wednesday" or from her brief stint in the "Scream" film franchise, while you most likely recognize Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's trilogy of films adapted from "The Hobbit." But the last thing you might expect to see is the two of them in a drama about a dangerous, erotically-infused relationship between a teacher and his student. Yet that's where we are with "Miller's Girl," the controversial film that features Freeman and Ortega in several intimate moments despite an age difference of more than three decades.

Critics were not kind to the film, with Common Sense Media saying it "brings back all of the ickiness of the 1960s-'80s, when movies and TV commercials portrayed tween and teen girls as sexually provocative and available to men." Yet while the Lionsgate release also polarized viewers, Freeman himself staunchly supported it, noting that the movie does not condone the relationship between professor Jonathan Miller (Freeman) and aspiring writer Cairo Sweet (Ortega). "It's not saying, isn't this great?" the actor told the Times of London (via Forbes).