Discover These Captivating Films If You Love ‘The Tearsmith’
If you love The Tearsmith, you are in the right place. This moving Italian romance stayed with me long after the credits rolled, and it sent me looking for other films with the same mix of longing, healing, and hard-won hope. Here are ten captivating films to watch next — each one different, and each one likely to linger with you, too.
I came across The Tearsmith almost by chance, and it quietly captivated me. Set in Italy, it is a romantic drama on the surface — but underneath, it is really about self-acceptance, and about how frightening it can be to let someone love you, flaws and all.
The Tearsmith (Fabbricante di lacrime) is a 2024 Italian romantic drama directed by Alessandro Genovesi, who co-wrote it with Eleonora Fiorini. It is based on Erin Doom’s bestselling novel of the same name — the book that sold more copies in Italy than any other in 2022 — and it became an international hit on Netflix. You can read more about its cast and story in Netflix’s own guide to The Tearsmith.
The Tearsmith follows Nica, who lost her parents in a car accident and grew up at the Grave, the strict Sunnycreek orphanage run by its formidable headmistress, Margaret. The children there held on to the legend of the Tearsmith, a mysterious maker of crystal tears who could stir the feelings they were taught to bury.
At 17, Nica’s dream finally comes true: Anna and Norman Milligan adopt her. But they adopt Rigel, too — the talented, brooding boy who was her rival at the orphanage. Living under the same roof forces old wounds and buried feelings into the open, and the two teenagers who thought they were enemies slowly become each other’s safest place.
What makes The Tearsmith hard to shake is its simple, generous idea: we are shaped by what happened to us, but we are not finished products of it. If that story of love after loss moved you, the films below offer their own versions of it — forbidden love, first love, gothic romance, and a few deliciously darker tales.
Carol (2015)
“Carol” (2015) is a historical romance directed by Todd Haynes, from Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, later republished as Carol. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara lead a superb cast that also includes Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler.
In New York in the early 1950s, shop assistant and aspiring photographer Therese Belivet falls for Carol Aird, an elegant older woman in the middle of a difficult divorce and a custody fight over her daughter. A spontaneous road trip turns a careful attraction into something neither woman can walk away from — however much the world disapproves.
Watch Carol after The Tearsmith for a love story told in glances and silences, where wanting someone means risking the life you were supposed to live.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)
“Blue Is the Warmest Colour” (2013), directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and starring Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, is a French coming-of-age romantic drama. Its French title, La Vie d’Adèle, means “The Life of Adèle.”
Adèle, a high-school student, meets Emma, a confident young artist with bright blue hair, and first love rearranges everything: how she sees herself, what she wants, and who she is willing to become. The film follows her through desire, joy, betrayal, and heartbreak with unusual honesty.
It is rawer than The Tearsmith, but the question underneath is the same one Nica asks: can I be loved as I really am?
The Handmaiden (2016)
“The Handmaiden” (2016) is a South Korean psychological thriller directed by Park Chan-wook, set in Korea under Japanese occupation in the 1930s. A con man calling himself Count Fujiwara hires pickpocket Sook-hee to become the maid of Japanese heiress Lady Hideko — and to help persuade her to marry him, so he can have her declared insane and steal her fortune.
Then the plan goes sideways. Sook-hee and Hideko fall for each other, loyalties flip more than once, and every part of the story retells the last from a new angle. It is gorgeous, suspenseful, and far more romantic than a con story has any right to be.
Choose The Handmaiden when you want the passion of The Tearsmith with sharper edges — secrets, revenge, and two women rewriting the story they were trapped in.
Disobedience (2017)
“Disobedience” (2017) is a romantic drama directed by Sebastián Lelio, co-written by Lelio and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and based on Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel. Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, and Alessandro Nivola star.
When her father, a respected rabbi, dies, photographer Ronit returns from New York to the Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon, London, that shunned her. There she finds her old friends Esti and Dovid now married to each other — and her old, forbidden love for Esti impossible to leave buried.
Like The Tearsmith, Disobedience is about the cost of hiding who you are, and the freedom that begins when you stop.
Let the Right One In (2008)
“Let the Right One In” (2008) is a Swedish romantic horror film directed by Tomas Alfredson, adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel. In a snowy Stockholm suburb in the early 1980s, bullied 12-year-old Oskar befriends his strange new neighbor Eli — a girl who only comes out at night, and who is not a girl of twelve at all, but a vampire.
It sounds like pure horror, yet at heart this is a tender story about two lonely children choosing each other — the gentlest pairing on this list with The Tearsmith, and in some ways the darkest.
Beast (2017)
“Beast” (2017) is a British psychological thriller written and directed by Michael Pearce, set in a small island community in Jersey. Moll, 27, still lives under her controlling mother’s thumb and helps care for her father, who has dementia. Then she meets Pascal, a rough, free-spirited outsider, and falls hard.
When local girls are murdered and Pascal becomes the prime suspect, Moll defends him fiercely — even as she starts to wonder what she is capable of herself. Beast asks whether love is liberation, or simply a new kind of danger, which makes it a bracing companion to The Tearsmith.
Moonlight (2016)
“Moonlight” (2016) is a coming-of-age drama directed by Barry Jenkins, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It follows Chiron in Miami at three ages — child, teenager, and adult — as he grows up around bullying and his mother’s addiction, and tries to understand himself and his feelings for his friend Kevin.
Juan, a dealer who becomes an unlikely father figure, tells young Chiron that at some point he has to decide for himself who he is going to be. Few films say it better, and Moonlight deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with a Best Supporting Actor award for Mahershala Ali. Its quiet search for self-acceptance sits beautifully beside The Tearsmith.
The Shape of Water (2017)
“The Shape of Water” (2017) is a romantic dark fantasy directed by Guillermo del Toro. In Baltimore in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, Elisa Esposito — a mute cleaner at a secret government laboratory, played by Sally Hawkins — discovers an amphibious humanoid creature held captive for research.
Elisa, who signs rather than speaks, recognizes a fellow outsider. Their bond grows in secret, and when the creature is sentenced to vivisection, she risks everything to free him. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, it is a fairy tale for anyone who has ever felt unseen — a feeling The Tearsmith knows well.
Crimson Peak (2015)
“Crimson Peak” (2015) is a gothic romance directed by Guillermo del Toro, starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, and Jessica Chastain. Aspiring author Edith Cushing, who has seen ghosts since childhood, marries the charming but penniless baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe and moves to Allerdale Hall, his crumbling family mansion in Cumbria.
The house sinks into red clay, breathes through its corridors, and keeps its secrets badly. As Edith learns what Thomas and his sister Lucille are hiding, love, betrayal, and ghostly warnings collide. If the gothic mood of The Tearsmith is what you loved most, start here.
Stoker (2013)
“Stoker” (2013) is a psychological thriller directed by Park Chan-wook — his first film in English — starring Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman. After India Stoker’s father dies in a car accident on her 18th birthday, the uncle she never knew existed, Charlie, moves in with India and her distant mother.
Charlie is charming, attentive, and wrong in ways India can sense before she can name them. Instead of running, she leans closer. Stoker is the most unsettling film on this list, and a reminder that Park Chan-wook — who also directed The Handmaiden, above — is a master of beautiful, dangerous desire. It shares with The Tearsmith a fascination with the secrets families keep.
Taken together, these ten films give you what The Tearsmith gives you, in ten different keys: romance, fantasy, and stories with a darker heartbeat, all of them about people learning to accept love — and themselves.
Looking for more to watch after The Tearsmith? Keep exploring our Movie & TV Reviews: a lone survivor fights to stay alive in our review of Nowhere, a luxury holiday turns sinister in our Blink Twice review, and love and betrayal collide in our Hidden Face review.
Final Thoughts on The Tearsmith
The Tearsmith ends where all good love stories should: not with two people rescued by love, but with two people finally able to accept it. We are molded by what happens to us, and by how the people around us treat us. Cruel years can wear down our self-esteem and teach us not to trust anyone.
That is why Nica and Rigel’s story lands. Their scars, visible and invisible, make it hard for them to lower their guard and be truly seen. Healing, the film suggests, is slow and sometimes painful — but it is possible, and it begins with facing the past instead of letting it decide everything.
So here is my takeaway from The Tearsmith: self-discovery and self-love are not detours on the way to loving someone else. They are the road itself. Once we can accept our own story, we can connect with other people honestly — and that is a bond that goes far deeper than the surface.
Enjoy your movie night! 🎬
