The One I Love

The One I Love is an intriguing little film staring Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss as Ethan and Sophie, a couple in a struggling marriage. When they take their therapist’s (Ted Danson) recommendation to spend some time together at a summerhouse billed as a special place for couples to discover their better selves, Ethan and Sophie get more than just a romantic weekend away.

The début feature from director Charlie McDowell and writer Justin Lader is one of those semi-improvised indies made very quickly and inexpensively in a single location. I’ve been won over by this new, ultra-low-budget style of filmmaking in which talented actor/filmmakers create their movies quickly, shooting without a fully written script. Pictures like Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister's Sister (2011) and James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2013) are so undeniably special that even an old-school curmudgeon like me, who’s stridently resistant to improvisation on camera and believes great films need dozens of people working for years and years to get right) must surrender to the organic charms and novel spontaneity of this approach. 

The One I Love actually plays like a combination of Your Sister's Sister and Coherence, but unlike those two perfectly realized gems, this film butts up against the limitations of the improvised dialogue technique. While the story is intriguing and thematically purposeful, too many scenes are repetitive and come off as inauthentic. The single location setting is restrictive and eventually becomes claustrophobic in ways that don’t serve the picture, and the robust ideas about maintaining love and attraction in a long-term relationship aren’t explored to a satisfying extent.

Contrasted with Your Sister's Sister and Coherence, as well as other standouts from this school of filmmaking like Joe Swanberg’s flawless Drinking Buddies (2013), I was often conscious of the actors “acting.”  Though certainly not all the time, far too frequently I found myself watching Duplass and Moss creating the dialogue necessary to move their characters to the next beat in Lader’s story outline, instead of experiencing Ethan and Sophie’s authentic reactions to their given circumstances.  Reflecting on the movie later on, I wondered how it might have turned out had Lader and McDowell taken the time to write a full screenplay and polish it through multiple drafts. I can easily envision a less successful outcome.  But rather than this realization leading me to think they went about making this film correctly, it caused me to question the strength of the premise. The One I Love is not a failure as film, but it doesn’t succeed in creating the unique suspension of disbelief that the best improvised indies pull off.