I Love You Forever (2025)

When Mackenzie meets Finn on a night out, she doesn’t think it will turn into anything. But after she slides into his DMs, her world turns from mundane to a romcom—and then a nightmare.

I Love You Forever, marketed as a “subversive” romantic comedy is in fact a painful horror film about a young woman deep in the throes of an abusive relationship. While she is never physically injured, Sofia Black-D’Elia’s Mackenzie is insulted, manipulated, and screamed at in a series of triggering montages that were so vivid I was frequently forced to look away.

On a directorial level, this film is a masterpiece. This was Cazzie David’s and her co-directing partner Elisa Kalani’s feature directing debut, but I wouldn’t have known it from watching. Aside from just the abusive scenes, even the interactions between Mackenzie and her friends were well-shot and felt like they were adding something meaningful to the narrative. Although I don’t know if I would clamor to see David as an actor (she played Ally, Mackenzie’s disaffected best friend), I would certainly love to see her direct again.

Part of what made this film worth watching is that it felt distinctly real. Mackenzie’s pain didn’t feel trotted out to entertain viewers or get easy clicks. Instead, it encapsulated the slow pull of an early relationship that’s turning abusive and what it’s like to be in the thick of it. Its success is also part of its downfall—I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the film to anyone, given how viscerally triggering it was to me despite, fortunately, never having been in an abusive relationship myself.

Still, though, I commend David and Kalani, who also wrote the film, for their commitment to realism and having women behind the camera. The writers, directors, editor, and cinematographer were all women, which is in stark contrast to last year’s It Ends With Us, which featured a male director who himself is accused of abuse of power, and Woman of the Hour, which was directed by Anna Kendrick but written, edited, and executive produced entirely by men.