I really enjoyed the trailer for The One I Love. The concept was cool. It looked like a sort of reverse Being John Malkovich with a pair of actors I'm really starting to enjoy: Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass. And to be fair, the first half of the film was legitimately fun and interesting to watch. But...
The One I Love is about a married couple going through a pretty serious rough patch. One day, their couples therapist talks them into taking a short vacation... But when they arrive at the prescribed location (a nice sort-of-country house), it's almost like they've stepped into another dimension...
Well that's just the breakdown without ruining anything. And Charlie McDowell even does an excellent job as a first time director. But for all of the fun positives of the first act, the third and late second acts seem to lack real decisiveness and tend to get bogged down in their own incomplete lore. I'm honestly a little surprised Justin Lader was able to get this script picked up given how sloppy things get. And it becomes really frustrating, because the end result is so muddled and separated from the original... and very simple... concept.
Regardless, this flick sports a couple of really good performances from its leads. And it has a great hook. It just doesn't sink it. The One I Love isn't an incomplete movie really, because it ties things up... but it feels incomplete, because the plot progression does not feel natural and ultimately proves fatal to the films chances of capturing a larger audience. As the old adage goes, "They can't all be winners."
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