The stuff people pay to have done to them at health spas...
dir: BT Meza
2026
No-one’s ever done something awful in the name of love, have they?
Affection’s baffling title doesn’t even make sense in retrospect, after the mysteries within this plot are revealed. I read some reviews saying this flick was the bee’s knees, and I guess my expectations were high, but it doesn’t help that, with a few tweaks, it’s virtually the same premise as another flick I saw recently, which I won’t name, because that would be a tremendous spoiler.
I see dead people – no, that’s not the one. Queen of the World? No, not that one either.
After some opening action, a woman wakes up, confused, in a bed, with some guy she doesn’t know. We’ve all been there at some point in our lives, girl.
When she wanders around a house she doesn’t recognise, a man appears calling himself Bruce (Joseph Cross) but he assures her that everything is okay, and that he’s her loving husband, and she’s just having issues with her memory because of an accident.
Based on the sheer quantity of movies I watch, and the sheer quantity of movies that seem to have the same premise, millions of women every day are waking up and being gaslit by some jerk first thing every morning. What an exhausting way to spend your morning, trying to figure out who you are. I guess heavy drinkers get used to it over time, but the rest of you…you have my pity and my thanks.
However violently the woman (Jessica Rothe) rejects this scenario, upon seeing a young girl who calls her mommy (Julianna Layne), she is taken aback. She doesn’t remember the girl; she remembers having a son, but she feels like the child wouldn’t lie about something so important.
So, hmm, I wonder what’s going on? And we shall wonder for a while, ever waiting for the reveal we know is coming, one shoe after another dropping until there are no shoes left to drop.
And then, before the big reveal, Bruce, like all Bruces eventually do, shows his true colours: He’s just a wife guy in love with his wife.
As I faintly referred to earlier, this premise made up a whole other film I watched recently and really enjoyed; but here it’s used to a much darker purpose, telling a much darker storyline, but just as the “how” of it was left murky in the other flick, however it’s done here is kinda wonkier, in the sense that it’s less convincing, but you ultimately “have to” accept it, because the premise is what it is.
Me saying “cars should not leap from skyscraper to skyscraper” doesn’t change the fact that there is a Fast & Furious movie where that happened, and we can’t all unsee it now, can we?
Me saying “people are people, except when they’re not” doesn’t change the fact that something is going on here, something terrible, but something supposedly motivated by deep, deep love.
Affection works only because of Jennifer Rothe’s performance, which comes as zero surprise to me. In the realms of Groundhog Day rip-offs, she starred in two of the best that went the horror route in the Happy Death Day movies, movies she entirely carried on her slender shoulders.
As she carries this one with its even more outlandish premise. This flick requires her to do a fair bit of stuff, a lot of gratuitous, gory stuff, but she’s up for the challenge.
Given the outlandishness of the premise, the actual solution it comes up with for the main character’s dilemma is quite ingenious, in that, you feel like the screenwriter, also the director, spent a lot of time figuring out how to resolve the plot. I’m not saying I liked the overall set up (it’s way, way, way overly complicated, even if I accept that whoever can do whatever the story requires), but the solution, from Ellie’s / Sarah’s / whatever her actual name is, perspective is quite clever.
Far too clever. This Bruce chap, fucking hell. What a piece of work. Someone must stop him before he picks up a guitar and does an acoustic set praising his beloved Elaine.
He just loves her so, so much. Maybe he and some other wife guys should get together and do a podcast about how happy they are to be wife guys.
Until, of course, the limits of love are reached, and ugliness ensues.
I read a lot of praise for the daughter’s performance, and I have to say, yeah, sorry darling, I can’t see it. Her acting was a bit off the whole way through, even as there is an explanation for it.
Overall it’s a flick that lurches drunkenly across a number of genres, none of which other than the “thriller” designation am I going to mention, because, again, that would be spoilers, and how well it does within those aspects will vary from person to person. She may be an adorable little moppet but on the most part I didn’t find it very convincing.
Except! There was one brilliant bit, which I’m pretty sure, not 100%, seemed like it was improvised and left in because it worked so well. At some point in a darkened house, Alice is racing around trying to find some batteries for her torch. Her father has convinced her that if the torch is on she’ll be protected from whatever she’s afraid of, and so she bolts to the kitchen, parks her beloved Mr Bunny on a stool nearby, and rifles around in a drawer for some double AA batteries to replace in the torch.
The second she parks Mr Bunny on the stool, he falls off. For a second she seems like “well, what should I do now?”, but then she immediately laments “Oh No, Mr Bunny!” with more sorrow than anger, and keeps doing what she’s meant to be doing with the batteries.
Sterling work, Alice!
There was one point where I thought: damn, we were tricked into thinking a specific person was the protagonist, and we were wrong. Who is the real protagonist now? And then it completely gets upended, conveniently or otherwise, and keeps chugging along in a new direction, and I thought: Okay, I’m still onboard.
It’s not the great flick I’d hoped for, but few flicks ever are. For all the confusion about memory and identity, surprisingly little of the flick is spent on those topics, which maybe is to the flick’s benefit in keeping it chugging along so the audience doesn’t get bored or have time to start thinking about all the flaws or implausibilities of the premise. But it means it’s robbed of any potential depth versus just keep crawling forward.
It all comes down to Jessica’s committed work in something that maybe doesn’t deserve her talents, but she gives it her all. It is a physically painful looking performance, and I don’t mean the stuff you might imagine would be in a thriller or horror flick. She has to portray, shall we say, a person undergoing a lot of side effects, sometimes all at the same time, and that could not have been easy. It looked exhausting.
And though I usually hate it when flicks end on a note of ambiguity like the note this movie finishes on, I actually thought it was pretty clever, and fitting, given what the flick is saying about how unhealthy obsession is for all concerned.
Affection. I have some affection for it, but eh, maybe not that much.
6 times I sometimes wish there was a stronger, healthier, handsomer version of me out there, but there are enough Hemsworths as it is already out of 10
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“We’re going to be a real family again.” – sure, get back to me on how that all works out - Affection
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