Look Both Ways review: Netflix’s multiverse fantasy has a baffling message

The new Netflix series is a must-see. Take a look at both sidesThe Groundhog DayYou can take a well-deserved break by formulating It’s possible to take some time off. GroundhogA time loop scenario, which was a sort of time machine, seemed to be the best way to apply a little bit of magick to stories about fates, choices and relationships. Every streaming service seemed to offer at least one movie in time loop. Palm Springs, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, Boss Level, NaiveAnd so forth. Take a look at both sides instead borrows from 1987’s Blind Chance, a Krzysztof Kieślowski movie where a young man catching or missing a train creates parallel timelines with very different lives. This was then reimagined as the Gwyneth Paltrow 1998 car. Doors with sliding doors.) Branching is a serious problem. Take a look at both sides isn’t a train, though: It’s the outcome of a graduation-season hookup between college friends Natalie (Lili Reinhart) and Gabe (Danny Ramirez).

Natalie is sick at graduation and takes a pregnancy test. In one timeline, it’s a false alarm, and she proceeds with her “five-year plan,” which involves moving to Los Angeles with her bestie Cara (Aisha Dee) and pursuing her dream of becoming a professional animator. Natalie, who is currently pregnant, moves to Texas with Luke Wilson and Andrea Savage to be with them. She also co-parents her child with Gabe, a neighbor, but not necessarily romantically committed.

Like other “what if this happened differently” thought-experiment movies, Take a look at both sidesThis film offers a chance to examine the complexities of major and minor life decisions. The film focuses on the basics of these choices and philosophizes with the vigor and intelligence of an innocuous rom-com. Or rather, two flavorless rom-coms: One has Natalie doing a sincere and charmless “will they end up together or won’t they” with Gabe, the drummer in what appears to be a Fun cover band. Jake Corenswet, a fellow Los Angeles filmmaker-world professional is the other.

Photo: Felicia Graham/Netflix

Wanuri Kahiu has a visually innovative idea for the film formula of two roads-diverged: she cuts two timelines into one, cutting them together fast and speeding up the alternating segments structure. Sometimes, images are overlayed, creating a sort of temporal split screen. It is possible to increase the number of jumps between timelines.You can do bothIt has a fast pace, and some rhythmic unpredictability. The latter is something the movie’s script grievously lacks.

Both storylines are mildly compelling in a soap opera sort of way, but the scenes in April Prosser’s screenplay often feel like reactions, rather than dramatizations. The plot unfolds, and then the characters discuss how they felt about it. It’s narrative as a particularly shallow therapy session. Reinhart is unable to sell Natalie in all of this self-absorbed fretting. Both Reinhart, the creative go-getter trying to overcome disappointment, and Reinhart, the stressed mom trying to keep a sense of herself, have an overemphatic shiny-plastic quality. This lacks even the expressionist cartoonishness that her work displays in the absurdly high-paced atmosphere. Riverdale.

More discomfiting is the growing suspicion that the filmmakers think they’re tackling some tough yet relatable issues, like the construction of those whimsically illustrated five-year plans that seem to exist primarily in movies about people who plan too much. The movie’s cutesiness borders on insulting whenever it blunders into harder choices. Granted, it’s probably pointless to complain about movies not giving full consideration to abortion when pregnancy is meant as the story engine. If one version of Natalie ends her pregnancy, there isn’t an obvious catalyst for her divergent fates.

But it’s worth pointing out just how weak-willed Take a look at both sidesThis is where it all comes down to explaining exactly why Natalie chooses to have an unplanned child at 22. She also decides to become a full-time mom, even though this seems to be against her wishes and plans. The movie is too squeamish to have Natalie express any explicitly pro-life beliefs, or to even mention the word “abortion.” Say what you will about films like Juno being misinterpreted as anti-abortion — at least it has the guts to say the word out loud. In an era where abortion rights are being actively legislated away, the pretense that terminating a pregnancy isn’t even an option worth considering or discussing feels like exactly the wrong message for the moment.

Photo: Felicia Graham/Netflix

So Natalie shrugs her way through a life-altering event, saying things like “This is what was supposed to happen,” so she can have some later scenes where she talks about being tired and worried, or pay some lip service to the joys of parenthood. The movie doesn’t pay more attention to the reality of parenthood. Her child is treated as a plot device that’s ultimately no more consequential than if she chose a particular job, or a particular roommate.

That may ultimately be the movie’s strange, hollow point: Natalie is the same person in both of these divergent multiverses, equally capable of taking different paths and overcoming different obstacles, to achieve different forms of personal satisfaction. This is the more sad side to movies such as Doors with sliding doorsOder Melinda & MelindaIt is overdone to try and erase any feelings of dichotomy among the paths ahead of Natalie. The resulting message, though, is shallow feel-good fluff: “Childless or young mom, coupled or singleton, dream job or side hustle, it’s all more or less interchangeable on this crazy journey we find ourselves on!”

Take a look at both sides has nothing meaningful to say about any of the subjects it’s supposedly addressing. Even when the filmmakers get little details right (Natalie’s animation references are spot-on and very convincing), the movie is playing the supportive friend to its audience, patting viewers on the back and talking about how everything happens for a reason, and it’ll all turn out great. The movie then gets to the most important part, which is talking endlessly about its own self a few minutes later.

Take a look at both sidesNetflix streaming available now