The Dead Wife Trope Is Back With A Vengeance. What Are We Doing?!

Has anyone else noticed an uptick in movies with dead and/or kidnapped women as plot devices to motivate male protagonists? I have. And I’m trying to figure out what in the Liam Neeson is going on.

I raised my eyebrows after watching Carry On on Netflix, a film about terrorists who threaten a TSA agent by promising that they have eyes on his pregnant wife and will not hesitate to kill her. Sure, the movie is a Die Hard-esque 80s throwback… but who among us is nostalgic for women in peril? Then, two trailers for upcoming 2025 films gave me pause. The first was The Amateur, a movie about a CIA agent seeking revenge for his murdered wife. The second was Novocaine, a movie about a pain-resistant man on a mission to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend. And wasn’t Paul Mescal’s character in Gladiator II avenging the death of his wife too?

(Points to Gladiator II for at least giving the fated wife an epic death in battle. However, no manner of bad-ass changes the fact that her role in the story was “inciting incident” and nothing else. She’s still a textbook woman in refrigerator.)

The ‘woman in peril’ is irksome because it’s boring

Leave male writers alone for two minutes and they revert to the Super Mario Brothers School of Storytelling, huh? They stow the proverbial princess in a proverbial castle (or coffin) to push the protagonist along. It’s not that I expect every female character to survive or be able to save herself in a dangerous situation. It’s the perpetuating idea that women exist to motivate men even in death. And as a viewer I lose interest when the character I’m “supposed” to relate to does nothing but scream and die.

In longer-form storytelling, it leads to a trope that’s even worse IMHO because it’s anti-romance: male characters breaking up with female characters to keep them safe. Bless Danai Gurira, writer and star of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, for cracking open the logic in this patriarchal way of thinking with one single line in a pivotal moment of that spin-off. “I only feel safe when I’m with you,” her character Michonne says to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) when he tries to distance himself to protect her. If you were in a relationship with a man who had main character energy, wouldn’t you?

A movie is not automatically sexist because the antagonist is sexist. It’s generally acceptable that bad people will do bad things. And a single example of a problematic trope is not necessarily offensive in a vacuum. It’s only when you start to notice patterns and analyze trends that it can become a problem. It’s more productive to focus on the storytellers who choose this type of story over and over.

Why are dead/kidnapped wives back *now*?

Tropes like this never completely die. The occasional superhero movie still dips into this well. There was a kidnapped girlfriend in 2024’s Road House. Pretty much every character in 2022’s Bullet Train had some kind of tragic dead wife backstory. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves riffs on this trope. However, that movie didn’t try to market itself a rescue or revenge plot. Without spoiling, it ultimately subverted the dead wife trope in an interesting way. I thought we were on a path to more creative storytelling!

So what’s going on with these recent action movies returning to old reliable? If you’ll allow me to get a little more apocryphal, it could be a troubling sign that Hollywood is pushing back against perceived “woke” narratives. We flew too close to the sun with Strong Female Characters and now we’re swinging too far in the opposite direction. We should be paying attention to the popularity of tradwives and other reactionary movements in popular culture and what that might mean for movies.

But it’s just as likely to be laziness or careless. Writers who grew up on stories where a woman’s death, whether it has happened yet or not, motivates a male hero often don’t see it as a problem. It’s as natural to them as a plucky sidekick or wise wizard. If you’re out there, making something, I beg you to resist the urge to kill wives and kidnap girlfriends! There are other ways to motivate your heroes, I promise!

I genuinely want to champion new and new-ish narratives in favor of IP rehash cash grabs. But when we revert back to these tropes it does not feel fresh to me. Even Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker whose name is synonymous with dead wife backstories, is working on an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. That story has a famously alive wife, and the peril Penelope may be in is nothing in comparison to her husband Odysseus. If Nolan can do it, so can you.

I can be cautiously optimistic. Maybe Rachel Brosnahan and Amber Midthunder weren’t cast just to scream and die in The Amateur and Novocaine, respectively. (Especially Midthunder, star of Prey and an action hero herself.) It’s very possible that these movies will give them more to do, or reveal some kind of twist in the third act. But the stereotypical (and I thought antiquated) way the trailers present these movies does not encourage me to get my butt in a seat and find out for myself.