Love Sick

The plot summary of Love Sick that I saw on letterboxd made me biased before I even saw the film. The film is about a woman with a girlfriend who also has an incestuous relationship with her brother. The summary I saw ends by saying the film follows and compares two kinds of “sick love.” And basically, I was against this comparison. I don’t think lesbianism and incest are comparable as two kinds of “sick love” and found such a comparison offensive. Anyway, I finally get around to watching Love Sick and I think that summary misrepresents the movie. Love Sick isn’t really a comparison of the relationships. It’s just a story about a singularly messy woman who, yes, has an incestuous relationship as well as a lesbian one.

Alex and Cristina, called Kiki meet when they room together in the city for college. Take a wild guess what happens next. Roommates become friends and friends become lovers. It’s WLWfilmreviews and I told you this in the opening paragraph! I also already told you that Kiki has a brother named Sandu who she has a pretty intense relationship with. It’s not immediately obvious they’re straight-up sleeping together but again, I already told you that. Anyway, Kiki and Alex struggle with various family struggles as Alex doesn’t want to come out to her more upper-class family. Kiki, meanwhile, is happy to go public with their relationship. Her family drama is more about the fact that she’s had a prior sexual relationship with her brother who still feels possessive and entitled to her.

There’s a good chunk in the middle of the film where you almost forget about the incest. The focus is on Kiki and Alex as they do Youth Stuff in the city. During this portion, Love Sick falls neatly into this sort of gritty European indie about young people living in the city and engaging with sexual freedom. This is one of those specific subgenres I’m pretty familiar with. And Love Sick is broadly, a middling example of that. Of course, what makes it stand out is the fact that there is indeed, an incest subplot.

I do think Love Sick downplays the taboo nature of a relationship between brother and sister. In many scenes, Kiki and Sandu’s relationship seems like just a straightforward heterosexual relationship between two rather messy people. At one point, Alex tells Kiki “I was really hurt when you went upstairs with your brother.” Like her concern is more around infidelity and hurt feelings than the whole incest thing. Maybe this is all an attempt to depict how a problematic straight relationship is still more normalized than a functional gay relationship. But it ends up feeling like the film chose to a pretty spicy topic only to underplay it. It’s to the point where I question how the director actually does view brother and sister incest. Because the perspective in Love Sick is almost that it might be fine, if only Sandu didn’t have personality flaws unrelated to banging his sister.

The film is at its best when it focuses on these absurd family dynamics. The third act deals with Kiki and Alex visiting Alex’s richer parents and Alex trying to hide their lesbian relationship. Of course, then Sandu shows up to yell about an even more objectionable topic. Before this, there’s also a family dinner scene at Kiki’s which is the star of the film for me. It’s a great, messy scene. Kiki is openly trying to fondle Alex. Uncomfortable Alex keeps trying to shut her down. Then, Sandu shows up for dinner to make leading but not quite overt comments to Kiki. Kiki’s parents don’t seem to have the full story about either of these relationships and chime in with their own benign conversation and opinions. I love a messy dinner scene. Love Sick provided a great one in between some ultimately middling surrounding scenes.

I can’t quite shake off the feeling that Love Sick does compare Kiki’s two incomparable relationships. The film is not nearly as bad as the plot summary made it seem, but the director still has some biases that come out in his depiction of lesbianism and heterosexual incest. In between that, Love Sick falls pretty neatly into this kind of European indie movie about the young generation; freedom and debauchery of city living and some grit in the story as well as the visuals. Love Sick chose for its grit to be incest, which is a bold choice. This choice becomes what the movie is going to be most known for. And with that being the case, I continue to have reservations about how Love Sick depicted this topic.

Overall rating: 5.5/10

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