I Love You Forever
Written and directed by Cazzie David and Elisa Kalani
Starring Sofia Black-D'Elia, Ray Nicholson, Jon Rudnitsky, Cazzie David
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 29 minutes
In theaters February 14th

by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer

What if your real-life rom com meet cute descends into an exhausting, abusive nightmare? I Love You Forever, the feature length debut of directors Cazzie David and Elisa Kalani, seeks to tackle that question, in the process attempting to clarify some of the unrealistic expectations movies have placed on romance and what to expect from it.

Mackenzie (Sofia Black-D’Elia) is a 25-year-old law student, disillusioned with the bleak dating landscape and in a situationship with a guy who seems both surprised and annoyed to realise she’s still in the room (Jake, played by Raymond Cham Jr.). At a birthday party for Mackenzie’s friend Ally (played by Cazzie David herself), she meets a charming journalist named Finn (Ray Nicholson), and it’s not long before she slides into his DMs and they begin texting on the regular.

On paper, Finn seems like he’s too good to be true. He texts back; he isn’t afraid to hop on a spontaneous FaceTime call; he rents out an entire restaurant for their first date; and early on in their relationship he tells her he loves her, live on air during a news report. But several months of late night video calls (the first time Finn raises his voice at Mackenzie is during one of these calls, as she’s on the verge of falling asleep), constant text messaging even when she’s in the middle of a lecture and increasingly ludicrous demands on her time start taking a toll on her, and, when those green flags turn out to be very red flags in disguise, Mackenzie is caught in an emotionally exhausting web from which it’s difficult to untangle herself from.

Black-D’Elia puts in a solid performance as Mackenzie, despite the fact that she isn’t given much character development to work with. There is however a realism to just how exhausted she looks once Finn starts showing his true colors. You feel the weight of him on her shoulders, the way she starts dreading her phone ringing (and ring it does, constantly, endlessly), the constant stress of having to keep up with his fluctuating wants while trying to remain present in her own life. Nicholson manages to pull off some of these darker moments as Finn, but is never quite believable as a whole. The key to the character of Finn would be in the moments where seemingly nothing is wrong, and the relationship is in calmer waters. Nicholson plays even those moments like he’s about to explode. It makes for an exhausting watch, and you’re left craving levity that never comes.

Early in the movie you have some nice little moments where Ally (the world’s most millennial woman) and Mackenzie’s other friend Lucas (Jon Rudnitsky) provide some comedic relief (personal favorite is the scene when it is revealed Lucas has a side hustle in picking up and returning abandoned rental bikes; apparently this is a job that pays money, who knew), but those moments grow to be few and far between the further into the relationship we get. Additionally, neither Lucas nor Ally, despite them being Mackenzie’s friends, are in any way there for her, unless it’s to dryly comment on how much tech Mackenzie is carrying around in order to be available for Finn.

While the idea of an anti-rom com subverting some of the genre’s key tropes is a solid foundation, I can’t help thinking that I Love You Forever would have worked a lot better if it had shed that idea and fully went in on the dramatic realism of a relationship gone wrong. Subversion can be punctuated by levity and humor, while keeping the story grounded in reality. Still, there are some solid moments in here, and I am curious to see what David and Kalani do next.

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