Eloise

If you just need a movie to kill 90 minutes, Eloise is a good option. There’s nothing particularly original about the film but there’s nothing terrible here either. While it falls on the good side of average, Eloise did not leave any lasting impression on me.

Eloise is framed through flashbacks. In the present, we see a woman named Asia in a coma in the hospital. Through flashbacks, we learn about Asia’s life. Asia attends university and has a stable boyfriend named Nat. However, she sometimes feels at a disconnect from him and her group of friends who can be sort of mean. On a whim, she signs up to be a model for art student Eloise. Eloise doesn’t have many friends and Asia’s friends gossip and make fun of her. However, Asia experiences a sense of freedom and familiarity with Eloise that she doesn’t with anyone else. However, Asia struggles to go all in with her relationship with Eloise. Societal and family pressures make her scared of coming out and letting the world know that the person she loves is not the safe, male Nat but the unusual and female Eloise.

The dialogue in Eloise is pretty literal. There’s no nuance or subtext. It’s just characters saying sentences to move the plot forward or blatantly express how they’re feeling. It’s perfectly serviceable dialogue that does the job of moving the plot forward but I did wish for a little more depth to it. Because the dialogue is so literal, it means the characters never feel like people. They just feel like characters.

Still, at least it is characters I grew to enjoy. It did take me a while to engage with this movie. However, by the third act, I was on board for the plot and the love story. There’s one scene in particular that sold me on Asia and Eloise’s relationship. It’s a scene where they come across a playground and then spend the next few minutes frolicking on said playground while romantic music plays in the background. That’s my type of romantic scene. It’s sweet, it’s innocent and it’s joyful. Asia and Eloise feel so much joy together. That’s what sold me on their relationship even when the dialogue was pretty average.

One thing I wanted Eloise to go deeper on was the idea of compulsory heterosexuality. Asia is at a disconnect with her boyfriend because he prioritizes masculine interests like watching sports. Asia doesn’t connect with this. The movie largely frames this as an individual failure. But if the movie wanted to go deeper (it didn’t), they could’ve used Asia and Nat’s relationship as a commentary on heterosexual relationships. It would have been nice to give Nat’s character a layer of performing an idea of masculinity instead of him just being a stereotypical straight dude who really likes sports. They could have framed him more specifically as a representative of a heterosexual relationship. Asia’s struggle could then go from her struggling to break up with him specifically to Asia struggling to free herself from the safety of a heterosexual relationship that she doesn’t feel at home with.

Spoiler alert: this movie does bury its gays. Asia never wakes up from her coma. Her death is clearly meant to be some sort of commentary on intolerance. In the climax of the film, Asia comes out to her mother. Her mother is unsupportive. Distraught, Asia runs out into the street and gets hit by a car. There’s the suggestion this was premeditated. Asia goes into the street specifically when the sign says don’t walk and she does so as a rebellion against Nat who is calling her back. Eloise is clearly trying to make the point that intolerance is the reason Asia is in this coma. This is far from the first movie to do such a thing. I don’t like it. If you’re going to kill off queer characters, at least don’t half-ass the connection between their death and homophobia with essentially freak accidents befalling these characters.

Eloise is middling. There’s some things I liked about this movie and some things I didn’t. Mostly though, Eloise is full of things that I had no opinion on; they were acceptable but not great. I’m not mad at the film but I wasn’t excited by it either. It just is.

Overall rating: 5.5/10

Other WLW films in similar genres