Love in the time of Covid: The pandemic has created a new genre of intimate filmmaking that’s a little too close to home

From ‘Malcom & Marie’ to ‘Locked Down’, a long list of relationship dramas will hit screens in 2021. But could they risk worsening our collective cabin fever? Geoffrey Macnab thinks they just might

Zendaya and John David Washington in ‘Malcom & Marie’ (Netflix)

Do marriages and affairs wither during lockdown or are they able to blossom? How much enforced intimacy is good for couples and how do would-be lovers meet when they’re under virtual house arrest? These are questions that Covid-driven relationship dramas – the new genre of filmmaking that has emerged during the pandemic – will attempt to answer this year.

Big name directors who are more accustomed to overseeing epics have been busily shooting chamber pieces about warring spouses and bickering sweethearts. Before The Bourne Identity’s Doug Liman makes his Tom Cruise-starrer in outer space, the filmmaker will release the appropriately named and much more earthbound Locked Down, a claustrophobic London-set romcom/heist movie starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Scripted by Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame, this is about an unhappy couple who can’t separate because of Covid. They’re caught in “a psychological prison of burning aloneness”. Hatching a scheme to steal a priceless diamond from Harrods does wonders for their faltering marriage.

New Netflix movie Malcolm & Marie, out this week, is not actually set during the coronavirus crisis – but was made entirely because of it. Written and directed by Sam Levinson, starring Zendaya and John David Washington, it’s a caustic relationship drama, filmed in black and white and unfolding over a single night. The filmmakers financed it themselves and shot it last summer in a Covid-secure location: a luxurious house in Carmel, California.