Movie Review

What's Love Got to Do with It? goes deeper than your typical rom-com

For those who aren’t part of a culture that subscribes to the idea of arranged marriage, the concept can seem completely foreign. Who would want to marry someone who’s almost a complete stranger and hope for love instead of falling in love first? The new film What’s Love Got to Do with It? approaches the custom through the guise of a romantic comedy, showing both the good and bad sides of the tradition.

Zoe (Lily James), a documentary filmmaker, and Kazim (Shazad Latif), a doctor, are longtime friends who grew up next door to each other in London. Zoe is looking for her next project, and when Kazim, who is of Pakistani heritage, tells her that he is about to embark upon the process of an “assisted marriage” – one where he is fully engaged in finding a wife instead of one being chosen for him – she convinces him to let her document the journey.

While she’s filming Kazim go through a type of Pakistani speed-dating, engage in Zoom chats with women in Pakistan, and more, Zoe struggles with her own checkered romantic history. Cath (Emma Thompson), Zoe’s well-meaning but overly-enthusiastic mom, does her own bit of arranging, trying to set Zoe up with James (Oliver Chris), her milquetoast veterinarian.

Directed by Shekhar Kapur and written by Jemima Khan, the film is lightweight but still more introspective than your typical rom-com. Though the outcome of the story would not seem to be in doubt, the filmmakers put in a lot of work showing how Kazim believes that an assisted marriage is the right choice for him, chastising Zoe on more than one occasion about her limited worldview.

Zoe’s bad luck in romance is attributed to factors like her being a workaholic and being attracted to men who are bad for her, typical rom-com tropes that are bolstered by the juxtaposition with Kazim. Through a series of When Harry Met Sally-style interviews with characters in arranged marriages, Zoe – and, by extension, the film as a whole – seems to be very cynical about love in general, with both types of marriages not seeming all that appealing.

While the film plays its story relatively straightforward, a few scenes are jarring in their attempt to provide a different tone. Cath seems to have an obsession with being part of Pakistani culture - dressing up in traditional clothes, speaking Urdu, butting in on dances at weddings – actions that may or may not cross the line of cultural appropriation. Kazim’s eventual fiancée Maymouna (Sajal Ali) is also portrayed oddly, going from quiet, shy, and reluctant in most scenes to over-the-top in one anomalous sequence.

James makes for an appealing lead, and the film allows her to explore the more dramatic sides of her character instead of playing her foibles for laughs all the time. Latif does well, although it’s a bit surprising that his character is not given the same depth as Zoe considering the ideas in the film. The supporting actors are mainly there to serve as comic relief, although they are almost uniformly portrayed as realistic people, a refreshing change for the genre.

A bit deeper than your typical rom-com, What’s Love Got to Do with It? is a solid play on the “will friends become lovers?” plot line. By comparing/contrasting the different ways people get married, the film offers interesting yet still entertaining ideas that rarely get explored in this type of film.

Shazad Latif and Lily James in What's Love Got to Do With It?

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What's Love Got to Do with It? is now playing in theaters.

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Movie Review

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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