“Affection” opens with a provocative, destabilizing question: What if you weren’t really you? Specifically, what if you thought yourself to be one person, but everyone around you told you not to trust those memories, insisting that you were someone else entirely? And the people in “your” life said that they loved “you” and needed “you” to care for them, pushing you into relationships and responsibilities to which you could not meaningfully consent? As a metaphor for the soft coercion of traditional gender roles, it works, although the theme is secondary to the twists in writer-director BT Meza’s sci-fi/horror hybrid.
Still, it gives the film a queasy undertone. Although it fits the definition of the term, “gaslighting” doesn’t feel like a strong enough word for what Bruce (Joseph Cross) is doing to Ellie (Jessica Rothe)—it’s nothing less than a full psychological dismantling. After an impactful cold open (no pun intended, if you’ve seen the movie), Rothe wakes up in a bed she does not recognize in a house she’s never seen before. Understandably, she freaks out, launching the film into another action scene that’s made more unnerving by its lack of context.
Rothe fights like hell as she tries to escape this reality and return to the husband and son she remembers, one of several scenes in which the actress gives her all to an extremely physically and psychologically demanding role. Meza puts his star through a number of grueling scenes, beginning with the first of several violent seizures in the cold open and building to a burst of primal energy in the goopy sci-fi finale. At first, it’s a tour de force for Rothe, who’s usually seen in more comedic horror fare; after a while, however, it feels more like an ordeal, for her and for the audience.
Even using the word “goopy” here is risky. This is a film where it’s best to go in as blind as possible. Even so, the big twist comes relatively early on, introducing some charming and creative practical body-horror effects into the narrative. This isn’t where the film’s horror comes from, however: That’s all in the character of Bruce, a malignant “nice guy” par excellence whose true, brutally violent nature emerges the moment he gets any kind of pushback from either Ellie or his young daughter Alice (Julianna Layne), who’s too young to know what’s truly happening but old enough to know that something is wrong.
That being said, as the story unfolds, Meza introduces scenes that posit Bruce as something of a romantic, a dedicated widower who will do anything to recover the lost love that’s randomized on a hard drive floating around in the cloud. (Don’t worry about it; this is not one of those rigorous sci-fi films where everything is at least theoretically possible IRL.) The hero’s edit Bruce receives in these scenes muddies what at first seems like a straightforward anti-domestic-abuse message, as does a stalk-and-slash sequence late in the film, where Ellie, previously a victim, inexplicably becomes the monster.
Is Meza really asking the audience to sympathize with a character who habitually murders and reboots women like they’re buggy app updates? Or, by concentrating more on the machinations of the plot than its implications, has the filmmaker unwittingly created a Rorschach test onto which viewers can project their own anxieties and life experiences, encompassing everything from incel entitlement to feminist rage?
Regardless of intention, that’s what we end up with, and the confusion is symptomatic of a screenplay whose ambitions outpace its clunky dialogue and plug-and-play character beats. The lensing and production design are similarly generic, save for a handful of inspired shots that, again, provide glimmers of a clearer vision than the unevenly applied one we ultimately get here. The film’s first 30 minutes are by far its strongest—perhaps not so coincidentally, this is also the section of the movie where we know the least about what’s going on. As is the case for its male lead, the more “Affection” explains itself, the less sympathetic it becomes.
