Movies Like Breaking the Waves
If you loved Breaking the Waves's Drama and Romance storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks

Clash by Night
An embittered woman seeks escape in marriage, only to fall for her husband’s best friend.

Young Adam
A young drifter working on a river barge disrupts his employers' lives while hiding the fact that he knows more about a dead woman found in the river than he admits.

Brimstone
In the menacing inferno of the old North-American West, Liz is a genuine survivor who is hunted by a vengeful preacher for a crime she didn’t commit.

Lucky
Follows the journey of a 90-year-old atheist and the quirky characters that inhabit his off-the-map desert town. He finds himself at the precipice of life, thrust into a journey of self-exploration.

Come Sunday
Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.

The Shipping News
An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.

Small Things Like These
In 1985, while working as a coal merchant to support his family, Bill Furlong discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent and uncovers truths of his own; forcing him to confront his past and the complicit silence of a small Irish town controlled by the Catholic Church.

Urban Cowboy
After moving to Pasadena, Texas, country boy Bud Davis starts hanging around a bar called Gilley's, where he falls in love with Sissy, a cowgirl who believes the sexes are equal. They eventually marry, but their relationship is turbulent due to Bud's traditional view of gender roles. Jealousy over his rival leads to their separation, but Bud attempts to win Sissy back by triumphing at Gilley's mechanical bull-riding competition.
More Movies Like Breaking the Waves

Jane Eyre
After a bleak childhood, Jane Eyre goes out into the world to become a governess. As she lives happily in her new position at Thornfield Hall, she meets the dark, cold, and abrupt master of the house, Edward Rochester. Jane and her employer grow close in friendship and she soon finds herself falling in love with him. Happiness seems to have found Jane at last, but could Rochester's terrible secret be about to destroy it forever?

Bitter Moon
A passenger on a cruise ship develops an irresistible infatuation with an eccentric paraplegic's wife.

Shell
Abandoned by her mother when she was a child, Shell has stayed to take care of her dying father but now feels trapped within the beautiful but desolate landscape that surrounds her. With only her routine of running the decaying petrol station, taking care of her father, and spending afternoons in her bedroom with a local mechanic, life is passing Shell by with every passing truck that rattles her walls. One day a salesman stops to re-fuel and offers Shell a taste of the outside world that takes her closer than ever to the edge of the road and her desire to escape.

The Outrun
Fresh out of rehab, Rona returns to the Orkney Islands—a place both wild and beautiful, right off the Scottish coast. Now 29 and after more than a decade of living life on the edge in London, where she both found and lost love, Rona attempts to come to terms with her troubled past. As she reconnects with the dramatic landscape where she grew up, memories of her traumatic childhood merge with more recent challenging events that have set her on the path to recovery.

Grandma
Self-described misanthrope Elle Reid has her protective bubble burst when her 18-year-old granddaughter, Sage, shows up needing help. The two of them go on a day-long journey that causes Elle to come to terms with her past and Sage to confront her future.

Breakfast on Pluto
In the 1970s, a young transgender woman called “Kitten” leaves her small Irish town for London in search of love, acceptance, and her long-lost mother.

Bastard Out of Carolina
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.

Elena Undone
The wife of a pastor who preaches against homosexuality embarks on an affair with a female writer.

Gracie
A teenager faces an uphill battle when she fights to give women the opportunity to play competitive soccer.

Women Talking
A group of women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony's men.

Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary Stuart, who was named Queen of Scotland when she was only six days old, is the last Roman Catholic ruler of Scotland. She is imprisoned at the age of 23 by her cousin Elizabeth Tudor, the English Queen and her arch adversary. Nineteen years later the life of Mary is to be ended on the scaffold and with her execution the last threat to Elizabeth's throne has been removed. The two Queens with their contrasting personalities make a dramatic counterpoint to history.

Dirty Sexy Saint
Clay Kincaid hates the nickname 'Saint', he got for being too kind to stray animals and desperate people. Especially when it comes to women. With a rough and damaged past that has left him jaded, he doesn't do committed relationships. This is before he meets Samantha Jamieson, an heiress turned runaway in need of help. When she starts to work as a waitress at his bar, he discovers that she is someone truly special and amazing… someone that could warm his damaged heart.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Breaking the Waves (1996): Drama and Romance themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Breaking the Waves.
See full details for Breaking the Waves (1996)