By Diana Helmuth | Film | March 14, 2024 |
By Diana Helmuth | Film | March 14, 2024 |
I Love You Forever is the first feature-length film from writer-directors Cazzie David and Elisa Kalani, marking their ascension from their 2017 web series, “Eighty-Sixed,” to the big screen. The film shouldn’t really be called a comedy — despite the fact that “Eighty-Sixed’s” humor is here and polished up to top form. It also can’t be called a romance — despite the fact that it’s about a girl looking for love. Instead, it’s an anti-rom-com, a postmodern glimpse at the current dating scene, preying with frightening believability upon one of our worst online dating fears: not what would happen if we met an ax murderer, but what would happen if we met Prince Charming.
The anti-rom-com genre is fairly new, historically speaking, and has a few slightly different definitions depending on who you ask — but a lot of us seem to agree it’s here, and it’s needed. I Love You Forever belongs in the same genre that (arguably) began with 500 Days of Summer, and continues through The Worst Person in the World. Audiences (especially women) are tired of optimistic, formulaic rom-coms. We want authenticity. We want to see our lived experience on screen — which is that dating sucks.
I Love You Forever is a heaping spoonful of that reality. Occasionally, rom-com tropes are trotted into the movie only to be called out by the characters for what they are: good for nothing but “the vibes.” Friends buy each other cakes for birthday parties and ice cream during breakups because they know that’s what they are supposed to do. But no one actually eats anything because they are too honest about their lactose intolerance and/or eating disorders. In this way, the characters call out the performance aspect of their own lives, acknowledging, with deadpan humor, that even though they are going through the motions to try and create a happy reality, they are really just playing out tired fantasies that even they know are never going to work. But they don’t know what else to do. None of this is real, except our ability to bond over how unreal it is. It should be noted that the heckling humor among these college friends is worth the watch alone, if you’re a fan of a witty deadpan and biting insults. David herself plays Mackenzie’s best friend, Ally, and I started to get excited every time she came on screen. Paired with Lucas (Jon Rudnitsky), the two had me involuntarily guffawing at full volume within the first 10 minutes. Initially, there’s no question about why it’s classified as a comedy. Both the writing and delivery of these jokes is top notch.
Our intrepid heroine through this postmodern plunge into modern dating is Mackenzie (Sofia Black-D’Elia). She is a painfully relatable (if you are or ever have been a woman between age 20-27) woman looking for love in all the wrong places. Mackenzie’s real problem, however, is one that is never said aloud but is critical to making the plot work: despite being slim, pretty, young, and intelligent, she has absolutely no self-esteem. Her love life consists of “you up?” sex sessions with a man who more or less treats her like a talking fleshlight. But she enjoys the kissing. She must be getting something out of it because she keeps going back. She keeps chasing the fantasy. Just like the rest of us, it’s like she doesn’t know what else to do.
Enter Finn (Ray Nicholson) — wealthy, popular, handsome, and committed to sweeping Mackenzie off her feet. They catch each other’s eyes at a party. But this is just the first part of what makes Finn truly different from Mackenzie’s previous flings and calls forth the optimism that the rom coms of the 90s once pulled out of us. Their first few dates are good — almost too good. Finn books an entire restaurant for the two of them to have dinner simply because Mackenzie tells him she is too nervous to eat in public. This is a deep cut, a painfully accurate version of the fantasy that every girl with low self-esteem has: that a man will come along and not ask us to grow but allow us to indulge in our smallness while he takes care of everything we are too afraid to deal with, all the while finding us charming. It was very hard for me to watch this scene and realize, if I’m being very honest with myself, that Finn’s first moves on Mackenzie would have probably worked on me. Meanwhile, my seatmates, two men over 45, would tell me that this scene immediately put them on red alert. But I was still feeling torn about what awaited Mackenzie. Still wanting to feel torn.
Whether it knows it or not, this movie is an allegory about the dangers women open themselves up to when they date without any sense of personal value. It is something I would have appreciated to hear said aloud, at some point, by at least one character. I want to position Mackenzie alongside social media’s recent revelations about Shakespeare’s Juliet: that she is not a romantic princess who died for love. She is a child with no self esteem and zero examples of healthy attachment who killed herself for nothing but to teach the rest of us a lesson. Mackenzie in many ways is a Juliet, destined for tragedy after giving herself fully over to a completely unrealistic kind of love. But Mackenzie’s lesson for her audience, like Juliet’s, seems to get missed.
Finn, however, is no Romeo. As the film goes on, he vacillates between a picture-perfect boyfriend and an emotionally abusive monster, weaponizing his abandonment issues to manipulate and gaslight Mackenzie. He is flabbergasted that she would not pick up his call when she’s in class. He threatens to kill himself every time they have a fight. He needs to know where she is and what she’s doing at all times in order to feel loved. Importantly, Finn is written as someone who seems to truly believe every word of what he says to Mackenzie, and has no idea how unreasonable he comes off. This keeps the film grounded in a far more horrifying reality. He is not a blackhearted villain. He is not a slapstick douchebag. He is mentally ill. He is the deranged reality behind any man who would rent out a whole restaurant on a first date, just to make the girl more comfortable about eating in public. The scenes where Finn goes dark often start absurd and then rapidly cross the line into genuinely terrifying. It’s jolting and unpleasant. But I question if this pacing was deliberate. After all, this is exactly how it feels when the person we thought was perfect turns on us 180 degrees in the blink of an eye. Nicholson is committed in these scenes - when he is in a glinty-eyed rage, it’s impossible not to see an echo of his father swinging an ax in The Shining.
In the end, Mackenzie frees herself from Finn and even has a moment of self-esteem victory against her earlier fuckboy. She takes healing refuge in her friends, who have remained by her side even though the film makes it clear she basically forgot about them for the duration of her relationship. They seem to simply understand. The assumption I took is that they all agreed they very well might have done the same thing, had a Finn come into their lives. But this, like Mackenzie’s total lack of self-esteem, is also never said aloud. In fact, like Juliet, it’s not clear if she has learned anything.
What this film really does is prey upon the secret fear of many single, young, straight women: that any man who would actually treat us as well as the male lead of a 90s rom-com is, in fact, out of his mind. The jokes are timely, sizzling, and sweetly accurate for anyone who has recently gone through the perils of online dating. But ultimately, we all left the theater feeling “a bit fucked with.” Perhaps that was the point.
The film brushes up against, but doesn’t progress, any conversations about online dating or an individual woman’s desire to feel both self-actualized and doted upon. You could argue that’s not the job of a comedy, but I would argue that the abuse scenes with Finn are too dark to make this movie a comedy. Instead, I’m left wishing it said more of the quiet parts out loud. But maybe that’s for Kalani and David’s next film — which hopefully will be soon.
‘I Love You Forever’ premiered at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.
Diana Helmuth is an award-winning non-fiction author with a tendency to overshare about travel, humor, romanticizing nature, and millennial cultural trends. Find her on TikTok or at dianahelmuth.com.