A Critical Look at Hollywood’s Dangerous Romanticization of Murder
Black Diamond (2025) thriller” directed by Judd Bloch, tells the story of Elena, a woman trapped in a controlling relationship with her wealthy hedge fund boyfriend Spencer. After an affair with Jesse, a local handyman, Elena orchestrates Spencer’s death to escape with her lover. The film frames this as liberation, with the couple driving off into the sunset together. But beneath its veneer of moral ambiguity lies a troubling message that conflates murder with empowerment.​
The Setup: A Gilded Cage or a Convenient Excuse?
The film positions Elena’s situation as a “gilded cage,” where she’s suffocated by Spencer’s controlling behavior and material wealth. This framing invites sympathy and borrows emotional weight from genuine situations of abuse, coercive control, or economic entrapment. But here’s the critical distinction the film deliberately obscures: Elena was always free to leave.
There’s no indication she was married to Spencer, no evidence of legal entanglement, no suggestion of financial dependency that couldn’t be resolved, and no credible threats of violence. She was dating a controlling man. The solution? Break up and leave. People navigate difficult breakups every day, even when it means losing lifestyle benefits or facing emotional discomfort.​
If Elena had the agency to conduct an extended affair with Jesse, carefully plan a murder, and execute it successfully, she absolutely had the capacity to pack a bag and walk out the door. The “trapped” narrative is fundamentally dishonest.
The Problem with Consequence-Free Violence
Regardless of whether the filmmakers claim the ending is “deliberately unsettling” or morally ambiguous, the actual narrative structure rewards Elena with exactly what she wants: freedom from Spencer, a life with Jesse, and zero consequences. That’s not ambiguity. That’s murder portrayed as a valid life strategy.
The film doesn’t show Elena struggling with meaningful guilt. It doesn’t explore Spencer’s humanity beyond his role as an obstacle to her happiness. One review even notes the film includes “uncomfortable contempt” for Spencer, with police suggesting he should buy a gun to protect Elena “like a true American would,” emasculating him for not conforming to toxic masculinity stereotypes. When your victim is dehumanized by the narrative itself, the moral weight of killing him evaporates.​
The final image, Elena and Jesse driving toward their new life together, is cinematically coded as triumph. This isn’t depicting violence critically. This is making it look appealing and consequence-free.​
The False Moral Equivalence
By presenting murder as Elena’s path to freedom, “Black Diamond” creates a dangerous false equivalence: it equates “I don’t want to give up this lifestyle” or “breaking up is emotionally difficult” with “I have no choice but to kill him.”
Elena is described as someone “not proud of her decisions” who sees her choices as what “society has given her to be successful”. But this psychological framing doesn’t change the material reality. She wanted her boyfriend’s continued financial benefits, his permanent absence, and her new lover simultaneously. Rather than make the adult choice to leave and rebuild, she chose murder to have everything at once.​
That’s not a story about liberation from oppression. That’s a story validating selfishness and violence when the perpetrator happens to be the protagonist.
What Message Are We Really Sending?
“Black Diamond” isn’t alone in this trend, but it exemplifies a troubling pattern in contemporary thrillers: murder as self-actualization. The implicit message becomes:
- Violence is justified not by necessity, but by emotional desire
- If you feel constrained by a relationship you can legally exit, murder is an acceptable shortcut
- Consequence-free killing is fine as long as you frame it as “finding yourself” or “choosing authenticity”
- Your protagonist’s desires matter more than another person’s right to live
Films can absolutely explore dark themes and morally compromised characters. But there’s a fundamental difference between depicting something critically and depicting it in a way that makes it look rewarding. When your character commits premeditated murder, faces no legal or emotional consequences, achieves all her goals, and the final shot is literally driving toward freedom with her lover, what’s the actual moral weight?
Saying “but it’s meant to be unsettling” doesn’t cut it when the visual and narrative language actively contradicts that supposed intent.​
The Bottom Line
“Black Diamond” dresses up a story about selfish violence in the language of empowerment and escape. It appropriates the real struggles of people in genuinely abusive or controlling relationships to justify murder as a lifestyle choice. And it does so while denying its protagonist any meaningful reckoning with the gravity of taking another person’s life.
That’s not moral complexity. That’s just bad ethics wrapped in stylish cinematography. And audiences deserve better than murder fantasies marketed as liberation stories.
