On DateTok, words like “gaslighting” and “love bombing” get tossed around so often they’ve started to feel like background noise. “We went from a time where this kind of vernacular wasn’t used at all to suddenly being used so much that they lost all meaning,” writer-director Cazzie David tells Bustle. When everyone is a “narcissist” or “manipulator,” it can dilute the words’ power to call out real emotional abuse. So David set out to give the language its weight back — channeling it into her darkly funny, painfully precise new anti-romcom, I Love You Forever. “One of our goals with the movie was to show what words like toxic actually mean.”
I Love You Forever follows a law student named Mackenzie (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and her news anchor boyfriend, Finn (Ray Nicholson). At first, Finn seems ripped from Garry Marshall film: He rents out a restaurant for their first date, then tells Mackenzie he loves her during a live broadcast. But as their relationship progresses, Finn’s “intensity” shape-shifts into behaviors like constant monitoring, jealousy, and outbursts. What happens when Mackenzie ignores Finn’s texts gave me more of a jump-scare than any recent horror flick. “Movies about toxic relationships seemed to always end with a murder, or something theatrical. What’s ironic is this kind of relationship alone, without adding melodrama, is so f*cking melodramatic,” says David, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Elisa Kalani.
Ever since the film started streaming on HBO Max, that’s exactly what’s started happening — in ways that, as one TikToker described it, are both “triggering and validating.” In one viral clip, a viewer says, “It is truly psychological torture… It’s one of the first times I’ve seen something that really reminds me of how my ex-husband would treat me.”
Another TikToker says she’s been trying to explain her own past experience to friends for months, without success — until now. “I really feel like nobody around me took me seriously… Please, if you watch it, that is exactly what I got done dealing with. And if your friend is ever trying to tell you they’re dealing with something like that, believe them.”
For David, those reactions — even the difficult ones — are the point. “Emotional abuse is so hard to comprehend when you are in it,” she says. “It’s so easy to convince yourself that that isn’t what’s happening, but being able to literally see it on screen makes that abuse harder to deny.”
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