Domestic Abuse / Live-Action Films

#-C

• 13 Minutes: Elsa's husband beats her frequently, including when she's pregnant.
• 28 Hotel Rooms: When they have a violent argument, the man pushes and shoves the woman from the hotel room in a rage.
• In 100 Feet, Mike apparently was battering Marnie from the beginning of their marriage until she finally killed him with the knife he went after her with. He starts again after his death and her return to the house.
• All Cheerleaders Die: Terry punches Tracy, his girlfriend, right in the face after she publicly insults him about being a bad lover and praises Maddy as fantastic.
• The Archer:
  • Emily, Lauren's friend, is being abused by her boyfriend Daniel. This sparks the plot, as Lauren tries to stand up for her. Emily still doesn't leave him though, and blames herself for making him mad. She even refuses to testify against him to help Lauren after she beat him up in self-defense.
  • Rebecca's mom also had an abusive boyfriend.
• In the alternate 1985 of Back to the Future Part II, Biff Tannen became a successful entrepreneur who also became bored with his wife Lorraine and only keeps her around as a Trophy Wife as revenge against his rival George McFly, whom he killed in that timeline several years after George fathered Lorraine's children. Biff goes so far as to even abuse his adopted children, and threatened to put his wife and her children in jail alongside her brother Joey if she ever tried to leave him. In a deleted scene from the movie, it is suggested that Lorraine ends up killing 1985-A Biff, which is why 2015 Biff starts to disappear after returning the DeLorean that he stole to give his 1955 self the sports almanac to change history with.
• Before I Go to Sleep: Mike is revealed to have beaten up Christine in the past, and he later hits her in the present as well. He tries to beat her up again near the end, yet she successfully fights back to overpower him.
• Michael Conrad in Black Zoo. He physically and verbally abuses his wife Edna (and murdered his first wife), and emotionally abuses his son Carl, who is mute as a result of his father's activities.
• Bloodthirsty: While influenced by the changes she's undergoing, Grey chokes her girlfriend Charlie before she knocks her senseless by tossing her against the wall. That being said, she quickly regrets it and urges that Charlie leave to save herself. At the time she also clearly isn't in her right mind.
• Blue Steel: Megan's father, who disapproves of his daughter becoming a cop, starts to mistreat his wife. Megan eventually arrests him for domestic abuse.
• In The Boondock Saints, the brothers get in trouble with a Straw Feminist, who loudly complains that their use of the term "Rule of Thumb" is sexist as it supposedly referred to the width of a stick a man could use to beat his wife.
• Bill, the first step-dad in Boyhood, turns out to be a nasty drunk subjected to violent mood swings. At one point, the young protagonist and his step-brother walk into their parents' garage to find their mother on the ground crying, with Bill angrily noting that she fell on her own accord.
• Brightburn Implied. Noah berates his wife when she told him that giving a rifle to Brandon is not the smartest birthday gift, and leaves her when he's attacked by Brandon. It's hard to tell if the latter is just him not thinking straight, saving Brandon, actually leaving his wife, or all three.
• At the beginning of Bunni, we see Lisa talking with her husband about his calls to someone named "Bunni", which he's in denial about. After continuing to pry into it, he goes ballistic on her, and we see a montage of him beating her cut in with the intro credits.
• The Burning Bed, starring the late Farrah Fawcett, tells the true story of Francine Hughes, who killed her husband Mickey Hughes to escape 13 years of domestic abuse.
• One of the women in Caged was arrested for shooting her abusive husband.
• Cruel and Unusual: Edgar is slowly revealed to have controlled his wife's life almost completely, stopping her from working or having her own bank account, and constantly being paranoid that she'd leave him or was having affairs. It's also implied that she's stuck with him if she wants to stay in the country, as her residence there appears to depend upon their marriage. She poisoned him due to feeling it was the only way to escape.
• C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America: One of John Ambrose Fauntroy V's In-Universe propaganda films, The Good Wife's Guide, features a housewife advising women to always defer to their husbands even when they stay out all night or give them a "fatherly smack," as the man is the head of the household.
• Cut to the Chase: Isobel was in a relationship with a guy, and wouldn't leave after he gave her a black eye in spite of Max warning that he'd also kill her someday. He's the prime suspect to Max when she disappears, but it turns out he isn't responsible. It turns out that she suffered this again even worse as she'd been seeing Nola and her boss at the same time. Nola found out, with Izzy leaving her because it's revealed she's a hitwoman. Izzy was then beaten up and kidnapped by Nola, who held her captive so she could never leave her.

D-L

• Dementia (1955): A random moment in the seedy hotel where the woman lives shows a domestic disturbance call. After a woman pulls down the shoulders of her robe to show bruises, the cop takes away her surly boyfriend/husband.
• In The Dry, Ellie's mother abandoned the family is order escape her abusive husband Mal. Unfortunately, Mal just redirected his abuse, both physical and sexual, to his daughter Ellie.
• In Dust Devil, Mark is a paranoid husband who thinks Wendy is cheating on him, and hits her whenever he thinks she’s lying.
• Entre Nous (2021): Laetitia finally submits to Simon's demands that she be with him so his harassment will stop. It naturally includes her having sex with him under this coercion. When she tries to leave him, he beats her, causing a miscarriage and putting her in the hospital.
• Feast of Love: David, after he argues with Diana, slaps her. She slaps him back and orders him to Get Out!. In spite of this, later they get together again.
• Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives: One woman, Stephanie, relates having been in a relationship where her girlfriend basically made her take the house wife role, and controlled her life. This had included how Stephanie dressed and who she hung out with.
• In .45, Big Al keeps his girlfriend in line with physical intimidation, and when he thinks she is planning to leave him, he delivers a physical beating bad enough to land her in hospital. And when she tries to take a restraining order, he threatens her until she backs down.
• Gaslight is a very well-known movie featuring abusive partners, to the point where gaslighting is named after it. Paula's recently married husband, Gregory, tries to make her think she's insane by making her think she is a forgetful Unreliable Narrator hearing noises.
• Girlfight: Diana's father had abused her mother, it turns out.
• The Grizzlies Spring shows up at Russ's house after her drunk boyfriend hits her. She requests and is given a place to hide until Roger sobers up.
• Stu's girlfriend in The Hangover is known to have physically beaten him at least once and emotional abuse seems to be ongoing. The other characters treat it much more lightly than they would a man beating a woman, the source of friendly "ribbing" instead of serious discussion, but they do at least make it clear that this is neither right nor normal and vehemently urge Stu to get out of the relationship. His "The Reason You Suck" Speech to his girlfriend later becomes his Moment of Awesome.
• Head in the Clouds: Mia is beaten with a crop by Lucien while they're dating, leaving marks on her back.
• Master Chun-yu from HEX, an abusive drunk who delights in beating up his wife and maid, never mind his wife's tuberculosis. The film also shows him beating up his wife onscreen in order to establish him as probably the biggest Hate Sink scumbag from Shaw Brothers cinema (being a studio with nearly 800 movies that's saying a lot).
• Jagged Mind: It quickly becomes very clear that Alex isn't a good partner to Billie, even before we learn what exactly is going on. She lies to her, drives her apart from her friend Kim, and manipulates her frequently by use of her magic. Also, she cuts Billie to draw blood from her involuntarily as well. She murdered Rose, her ex, to get rid of another person in her life who could come between them, by telling Billie what she's really like. On being confronted by Billie on what she discovers of Alex's past, Alex hurls an object her way and she denounces her suspicions. Billie recovers many more memories about Alex cruelly insulting her after using the same magic for creating a time loop herself as well.
• In John Doe: Vigilante, one of John Doe's targets is a husband who is bashing his wife. John beats him to death in the laneway behind his house.
• Adelle in Kalifornia, who is involved with Serial Killer Early Grayce. It gets even sadder when she reveals that he only whips her when she "deserves it," and that she feels like he protects her from the people who have done worse things to her. Adelle was gang-raped as a young teenager, which left her in the hospital for months.
• Dean from Kingsman: The Secret Service openly beats Eggsy and is implied to beat his wife, Eggsy's mother, too.
• Kung Fu Zohra is a film about a woman from the Algerian diaspora in France who learns kung fu to defend herself against her violent husband.
• In Last Train from Gun Hill, Craig Belden beat his lover Linda so badly that she needed to be hospitalized, based on unsubstantiated rumours from his son Rick
• Canadian-made TV movie Life With Billy. Based .on the book by the same name, it's the true story of Jane Hurshman's relationship with her common-law husband Billy Stafford. The film starts with her shooting her husband as he's passed out drunk in the driver's seat of his pickup truck. During her court testimony, we're shown their story through a series of flashbacks. At one point, when Hurshman is describing a particularly horrible act, her lawyer asks why she didn't leave him. She could only answer that she was afraid he'd kill her entire family.
• Little Shop of Horrors: Dr. Orin Scrivello regularly beats his girlfriend Audrey and leaves her with black eyes. She's too much of a Love Martyr and too afraid of him to leave him. His abusive behavior is what convinces Seymour to make Orin the first person he feeds to Audrey II.

M-R

• The Lifetime movie Men Don't Tell features a woman who was abused as a child committing this against her husband. This is most definitely not Played for Laughs and no one believes him for most of the movie.
• Edgar, before he is killed and taken over by the Bug in Men in Black, is shown to be emotionally abusive towards Beatrice in his first scene, where he acts as though the meal she prepared for him was poison (and yet barks at her to not take the food away as he's eating it), and also claims her to possibly want to poison him as she skulks away like a dog who was either hit too much or hit too little (he doesn't know or care which it is), states that she's so useless that the only thing that could carry its weight around is his pickup truck (which is promptly totaled by the Bug's spaceship), and finally, when questioned by Beatrice about what just crashed into his truck, he angrily tells her to get "her big butt" back in the house. Going by some statements he made, he might also be physically abusive towards his wife as well.

• In Modesta, which is set in rural Puerto Rico in the 1950s, Modesta's husband dismisses her troubles doing household chores on account of being pregnant. He even threatens to beat her if the next baby is a girl. Later at the neighborhood's League of Liberated Women's meeting, a neighbor who proposes a law forbidding men to hit their wives is sporting a black eye.
• My Animal: It turns out Jonny had been hit by her boyfriend Richard, which Heather discovers.
• In The Night Clerk (2020), Karen's killer beats her in the hotel room before he shoots her. He later beats Andrea, and leaves her alive with a busted lip.

• Another Lifetime movie, No One Would Tell, is based on a true story about a teenage girl who is abused and later killed by her boyfriend. The film is notable in that Fred Savage plays the abusive boyfriend and Candace Cameron portrays his girlfriend/victim.
• The 2011 Lifetime film, No Surrender, introduced a woman named Jenny Reardon as victim of spousal abuse, having written letters to writer Amelia Davis (Mena Suvari) about her abuse at the hands of her husband, who she killed in self-defense. However, in a twist, it was revealed that Jenny was the true abuser and Trevor wrote the letters. Jenny killed Trevor in cold blood after finding out, and she had colluded with Amelia's abusive ex-husband (who Jenny later killed, also in cold blood) to ruin Amelia, as Jenny blamed Amelia for "ruining her life."
• In The Notebook, a scene takes place where a woman repeatedly shoves and hits a man.
• Not Without My Daughter has Betty Mahmoody, played by Sally Field, being beaten by her Iranian husband, Moody, played by Alfred Molina. They were happily married in America and they had a daughter named Mahtob. They all went to Tehran, Iran on vacation for two weeks to visit Moody's family. After the two weeks ended, he wants his wife and child to stay in Iran and try to conform to the customs there. Betty refuses for this to happen, and Moody slaps her to make her stay. Betty and Mahtob secretly try to get out of Iran with the help of the Swiss Embassy and a few sympathetic Iranians. If Moody ever suspected that she was trying to escape or be late for something, he would beat her, even in public.
• The Odd Way Home opens with scenes of Maya being violently beaten by her boyfriend. She leaves while he's asleep on the couch.
• Ondine:
  • Syracuse and his ex-wife do not have a healthy relationship, and it's entirely her fault.
  • Joanna turns out to be married, with a husband who's a vicious drug smuggler and treats her about as bad as you would expect.
• In The Other Guys he never gets physical, but Allen Gamble (one of the heroes) is emotionally abusive to his wife to a rather disturbing extent, vigorously and repeatedly insulting her physical appearance, sense of style, cooking ability and calling her an adulterer and whore when she reveals that she is pregnant. This occurs both in private and in the presence of others. He later explains that he does this all because he fears that, if she ever realizes how truly beautiful she is, she will leave him; this makes things worse, since it shows that he is aware that his actions are wrong and is deliberately traumatizing his wife for his own ends. It is not Played for Laughs, it does not set up an Aesop, it is just... awful.
• Perfect Addiction: Sienna reveals Jax was psychologically abusive while they were together, eroding her self-esteem slowly and gaslighting her, while he also manipulated her into bondage that she didn't want. The same thing happens when he dates her sister.
• Pitch (2009): It's implied that Gene's dad beat his mom. When her spirit appears, her face is bruised, and Jim urges Gene not to make the same mistakes his father did.
• Provoked has Kiranjit Ahluwalia, played by Aishwarya Rai, who was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by her husband for ten years. She couldn't take it anymore, so she used a Napalm oil mix to pour on his feet while he slept and burned him.
• The Purple Rose of Cairo revolves around a woman avoiding an abusive husband by taking refuge in filmed fantasy. It makes the ending, in which she goes back to her husband, all the more heartbreaking.
• Reviving Ophelia provides a textbook example of an abusive relationship. Elizabeth's relationship with a boy named Mark starts off sweet and innocent before he becomes possessive, controlling, and physically violent towards her. It only gets worse when he threatens to pull a Murder-Suicide after she breaks up with him and gets a restraining order against him.
• Rise of the Scarecrows: Dicky, the town mechanic, is shown late in the movie force-feeding his wife the wet powder she was using to make dinner.
• Road House (1989): After Brad Wesley's mistress is too forward one time too many with Dalton, she's dragged out of the roadhouse by one of his goons. She's next seen in Wesley's mansion with a bruised-up face.
• A Room in Town has Edith live unhappily with her abusive husband, who owns a television shop.
• In Rovdyr, the relationship between Roger and Camilla shows many of the hallmarks of being abusive. He constantly belittles and ignores her; speaks for her rather than allowing her to answer for herself; grips her arm quite forcefully while they are in public; and whines about how he'll be lonely when she goes off to university. Team Mom Mia picks up on this and encourages Camilla to stand up for herself.

S-Z

• Morgan's husband Rex in Saw IV is revealed to have beaten both her and their daughter for years.
• Sex and Death 101: Death Nell endured abuse by her husband, who had forced her to engage in sexual roleplay she found degrading, and beat her as well.
• SHAZAM! (2019): When Billy moves into the apartment complex where his biological mother currently lives, someone is heard shouting in his mom's room, indicating that she is left with a verbally abusive partner after leaving Billy to foster care.
• In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts' character is a wife suffering in a marriage with her abusive husband, who refuses to let her go. She seeks escape by faking her death and living an entirely new life with someone else... until her husband tracks her down.
• Stonehearst Asylum: Implied to be the case with Eliza, whose husband was apparently possessed of "unnatural" appetites, and it's likely the cause of her mental illness too.
• The Strange Thing About the Johnsons shows a rare occurrence where the child is the abuser and the parent is the victim. Isaiah has been sexually assaulting his father, Sidney, for 14 years while gaslighting and blackmailing him in order to get him to put up with the abuse. Sidney is brutally raped by Isaiah in the bathtub; the ordeal leaves him psychologically scarred to the point where he kills himself by hit-and-run.
• Suffragette takes place in England during a time before women had the right to vote, and most of the suffragette's husbands practice some form of abuse. Violet's husband is a surly and violent drunk, and everybody knows it. Maud's husband seems to be not that abusive at first, but after her picture gets into the newspapers as that of a suffragette, he throws her out of the shared home that is at least partially paid for by the money she earns as laundress, and later on gives up her son for adoption without asking her — when she returns home one day, the couple is already there to pick up their adoptive son. She is, of course, devastated. There's also the rich man who stubbornly refuses, after paying the caution for his wife, to also free her fellow suffragists, a form of Financial Abuse, as he's obviously wealthy enough to easily afford it.
• The Symbol of the Unconquered: Upon accidentally revealing to his girlfriend that he's black, Jefferson gets so mad at his mother that he strangles her and throws her to the ground.
• Tales of Terror: In "The Black Cat", Montressor heaps verbal, physical and economic abuse on his poor wife Annabelle. It is little surprise he winds up murdering her.
• The Theatre Bizarre: In "Wet Dreams", Donnie verbally and physically abuses his wife Carla who extracts a terrible revenge with the aid of Donnie's psychiatrist Dr. Maurey.
• This is the setup for everything that happens in Thelma & Louise, specifically Thelma's husband (who was an emotionally and mentally abusive Manchild, but not shown to be physically abusive).
• Through Black Spruce: Suzanne was abused by her boyfriend Gus, but she refused to leave him, coming to work with a black eye because of it once.
• Tromeo and Juliet: Capulet beats up his wife Ingred when he grows angry with her. By the lack of reaction from Juliet and Ness, this happens regularly.
• Jenna's husband from Waitress is a particularly nasty version. It's almost purely emotional, though he does finally hit her when she tries to leave for the pie-baking contest in another state. All the damage is done through emotional putdowns, misogynistic remarks and a general ignorance of anything regarding her feelings, thoughts, or desires. The film does an excellent job portraying how difficult it is to extract oneself out of this sort of situation, without being Anvilicious.
• In the 2011 film Warrior: When his father mentions swearing off women, Tommy mumbles that it must be hard to find a woman who can take a good punch these days.
• In The War Wagon, Crazy Jealous Guy Wes certainly abuses his wife Kate emotionally, and probably physically as well. He treats her more like a possession than a spouse, and Kate later reveals to Billy that Wes bought her from her parents for $20 and a horse.
• The Whale: In addition to her treatment of her father, Ellie is also noted to be very hostile and violent towards her mother, even stealing from her medicine cabinet.
• In When Darkness Falls, Håkan beats his wife Carina, as well as his father used to beat his mother.
• Chris in The Woman regularly slaps his wife around whenever she speaks out of line. His abuse of his wife is interplayed with his abuse of the feral woman that he captures.
• Women Is Losers: Celina's dad is an abusive jerkass who mistreats her mom and demands her money as payment for babysitting his grandson (well, her mom does the work mostly) even when Celina pays half already, plus many other expenses. When she angrily tells him off, her dad slams her against the kitchen wall, and then threatens his grandson for intervening. This is the last straw for Celina, who leaves along with her son.
• Women Talking: Mariche, even apart from being raped secretly like the other women, has been abused by her husband over many years. She repeatedly forgave him as her sect's principles dictate and her own mother had advised. After realizing what she's endured, her mother apologizes for doing so. When her husband returns, she gets beaten severely by him offscreen, left with a black eye and right arm in a sling.
• The World of Kanako: Protagonist Akikazu is implied to have abused his daughter Kanako when she still was younger. Later on he punches and sexually abuses his wife Kiriko when he's angry.

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