Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Murphy is an American living in Paris who enters a highly sexually and emotionally charged relationship with the unstable Electra. Unaware of the seismic effect it will have on their relationship, they invite their pretty neighbor into their bed.
Gaspar Noé's Love is visually distinctive with his signature neon-drenched Paris aesthetic and explicit 3D cinematography, but the film's strengths are unevenly distributed. The plot is thin and repetitive, cycling through flashbacks of a doomed relationship without much narrative momentum or character depth. The acting from the largely non-professional cast is inconsistent — Aomi Muyock and Klara Kristin bring raw authenticity at times, but Karl Glusman's Murphy is often grating and unsympathetic. Cinematography earns a bump for Noé's bold visual choices and the genuinely striking use of color and space, though the explicit sex scenes are more provocative than artistically revelatory. Novelty sits above average — a mainstream-adjacent explicit art film about romantic regret is a fairly singular proposition, even if Noé's auteur toolkit is familiar from his prior work. The ending is a flat, unresolved non-conclusion that feels more like a shrug than a deliberate artistic statement.