Louise and Her Lover

I’m almost impressed about how little this movie has to offer. Louise and Her Lover has genuinely no positives to it. And perhaps the worst part about the movie isn’t that it’s bad; it’s how fucking boring it is. I genuinely don’t know if there’s another WLW movie I struggled to pay attention to as much as this one. I sat in my dark room and looked directly at the screen Louise and Her Lover played on. And still, I kept realizing that entire scenes had passed without leaving any impression on me or my memory. This whole movie washed right over me and left no evidence that it ever happened behind.

I think it’s fair to say that Louise and Her Lover exists because a man with a camera wanted to watch some pretty women kissing in their underwear. There’s more to the plot too, but I think pretty women is the seed of the inspiration. The film is about a visual artist named Johanna who hires a model to pose for her. The model, Lily quickly falls for Johanna and vice-versa. After beginning a relationship, Lily reveals she lied about her profession to Johanna. Lily also begins to have dissociative fantasies about stalking Johanna with a knife. Obviously, this means the next step is to bring another woman into their relationship for sexy lesbian funtimes. These events are intercut with Lily being interrogated after some sort of dramatic event.

Louise and her Lover is an all-around amaetur production. It’s low budget too, but even within that framework, director Ryan Balas does not show mastery of his craft. He also doesn’t show a lot of passion. What is almost interesting about Louise and Her Lover is how passionless it all feels. Even the sex scenes! Usually in movies like this at least the sex scenes seem to come from a place of directorial enthusiasm. But nothing here makes this film read as a passion project. Which makes me question the film’s existence at all. It’s like this was a new story that needed to be told or anything. Nor is there any sort of visual experimentation or flair. This means that despite the film’s brief runtime, it feels like an absolutely slog.

As a thriller, this is a deeply uninspired story. It’s the laziest of thriller beats. What if you got into a romantic relationship and the person was different than you thought? And then someone has mental illness and there’s some violence right at the end. Standard to the point of tedium. The film also depicts the whole lesbian threesome angle as more salacious than it actually is. The idea of a lesbian couple where one of them is an artist and sometimes they have sex with other people is extremely common in the circles I run in. And even if it isn’t common, it’s not exactly the radical fringe of human sexuality. The film seems to place a certain amount of value judgment on the couple for sometimes having threesomes. But that really isn’t the problem here.

At least the movie culminates in a deeply silly scene, I guess. The scene in question is supposed to be a dramatic, violent moment. But they’re don’t have the budget to make it good. So instead, they try to style it out and use some slow motion. And the result is goofy as hell. Still, at least this movie has one notable scene.

There’s genuinely nothing to recommend about Louise and Her Lover. This movie is a failure across every single level. And subsequently, it fails as a completed project. Cheap, amateur and uninspired, Louise and Her Lover is a chore to sit through. But even that oversells it in a way. This is a boring and exceedingly forgettable movie that’s almost not even worth complaining about.

Overall rating: 1.9/10

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