Love Actually Plotlines Ranked By Sadness

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Peter, Mark, and Juliet

Here’s where we start getting into the real, nitty, gritty, cry-just-thinking-about-it-on-your-morning-commute stuff. We meet these three at the wedding of Peter and Juliet, where Mark is the best man who also happens to be taking incessant video and oh yeah secretly hired a band to hide in the church and joyously play “All You Need Is Love” as the couple takes their leave back down the aisle. Already, it’s ten damn Hallmark greeting cards fulla love. But we soon learn that Juliet is (seemingly, correctly) under the impression that Mark doesn’t like her. He never really speaks to her, he’s cold, and it would be semi-understandable, as she’d just called legal dibs on his best friend. So that’s why, when she shows up at his apartment asking to see the footage he’d shot of her wedding day to find that it’s entirely lovingly curated close-ups and long shots of ONLY her, we melt into a puddle of unrequited-love-based tears.

And to make this even more cry-y up in here, Mark later appears on her doorstep in the most famous and perhaps most stupidly romantic scene of the film. He has written out his confession on posters so that he can profess his love for Juliet without being overheard by his best friend inside (okay putting it like that makes it seem terrible and not painfully lovely but WHATEVER). He asks her to tell Peter that it’s carol singers, and proceeds to present the cards one by one, telling her that, because it’s Christmas and at Christmas, you tell the truth, he will love her until his wasted heart is a shriveled up corpse. It’s way more romantic than it sounds, and I’m crying about a photo of a mummy taped to a posterboard as I write this. As Mark leaves, Juliet catches up to him and gives him a sweet, sad kiss. And as he walks away, he mutters “Enough. Enough, now,” to himself but probably mostly to us because he knows we’re heaving snotty sobs into our pillows AND WE NEED TO PULL IT TOGETHER, PEOPLE.