Till death us do part: Looking back at the most murderous marriages in cinema

Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck are starring in a new erotic thriller, ‘Deep Water’, as a couple whose intimacy depends on killing. But, writes Geoffrey Macnab, many more macabre unions came before them

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as an assassin couple in ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ (20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock)

You might want to become king of Scotland. You might be furious and humiliated at all your wife’s affairs. You might need your lover to knock off your husband for his insurance policy. Cinema history is full of murderous couples – and of marriages that leave bloody piles of corpses in their wake.

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are currently on Apple TV in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, as the spouses conspiring to kill King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson). Coen reinterprets Shakespeare’s tragedy as a marital melodrama about a couple who turn to violence because they haven’t managed to start a family. Lady Macbeth can’t provide her husband with a son but she validates their marriage by helping him topple the monarch and usurp his place.

“It is her personal tragedy that fuels her ambition to give her husband the crown, because she has not been able to give him an heir. For me, that is the essence of the character,” McDormand recently told IndieWire.