The gays deserve better. What started as a sweet and steamy retro lesbian U-Haul romance story quickly devolved into soap opera level twists and turns in the criminal thriller plot. I think the second half was supposed to be shocking, but it was mostly boring and vapid. The kind of stuff that falls apart once you think about it for two seconds.
The characters are one-dimensional and their motivations are unclear. The side characters in particular are stereotypical and flat throughout, but the worst of it is that the earnest romance between our leads that we were treated to in the first half of the picture gets replaced with…nothing? The emotional depth and tender moments are removed for artificially high stakes—murder and a criminal underbelly that all feels suddenly out of character for our protagonists.
This turned into slop real quick. I have no idea why this movie is so highly reviewed and feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading people’s takes. This isn’t just Online Gays who will eat up their queer media slop, squee-ing about how the second season of Our Flag Means Death slayed even though it became unmoored from everything the beautiful first season established (but hey it’s really leaning into being The Gay Pirate Show now!), no, there are real discussions of how artful this film is.
I don’t know what I’m missing! If it wanted to be over the top, if it wanted to have some surreal elements, that’s great, but it has to be in service of something. There has to be enough heft in the connection between the characters, for example, to make it impactful. When the gallery of cheap twists one after another come at the expense of our characters having any consistent or identifiable motivations and personalities, I tend to call it quits. This isn’t camp, it’s just bad. And it’s painful how good this could have been—how good it started out as.