It doesn’t have to be romantic lovers to make this storytelling principle work. It can be friends. It can be enemies.

After the final bloodbath sequence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Deke Thornton (played by Robert Ryan), who had been pursuing the outlaw band throughout the movie, comes upon the shot-to-hell corpse of the Bunch’s leader, Pike (played by William Holden.) Pike, though dead, clings to the trigger mechanism of the .50-caliber machine gun he’d been firing in the preceding blood-and-guts scene.

Deke had once been a friend of Pike’s and still respects and admires him, even though he’s been chasing him, trying to kill him, throughout the whole picture.

Deke spots Pike’s six-shooter, still in its holster on Pike’s hip. He reaches and takes it.

In other words, “I love you.”

Another great moment between non-lovers is the finish of the movie version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

This is the scene where Randle McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) has been returned to the psychiatric ward, having been lobotomized. His friend, Chief Bromden, played by Will Sampson, stands over the bed, heartbroken at what the hospital powers have done to the man who always believed in him and told him he should be free.

Chief places a pillow over McMurphy’s face and releases him from his shattered life, then uses the physical strength he had possessed all along but had never had the courage to put into play—and breaks through the hospital wall and escapes.

“I love you” doesn’t have to be said in words, and it doesn’t have to be between lovers.