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There’s a scene midway through Netflix’s first interactive romcom, Choose Love, where our lead Cami (Laura Marano) has a fight with her partner Paul (Scott Michael Foster) in an escape room. The couple are there with Cami’s sister and brother-in-law who both idle awkwardly while this domestic unfolds, unable to leave the room. That is exactly what watching Choose Love feels like.
Following Black Mirror’s trippy one-off special “Bandersnatch” back in 2019, Choose Love is part of the next evolutionary stage of the algorithm. It is made for the ‘live, laugh, love’ audience who have always wondered what it would be like to steer the romantic life of a rom-com protagonist. For the rest of us, to whom the ‘mindless’ part of ‘mindless Netflix romcom’ is the entire appeal, Choose Love is a specially made hell.
The set-up is a basic rom-com love triangle straight off the assembly line. Cami is feeling unfulfilled by Paul and in her career as a sound engineer. Enter Jack (Jordi Webber), an activist and her high school crush, and Rex (Avan Jogia), a mouthy British pop star. Every four minutes Netflix allows you to make decisions for Cami, aided by her fourth-wall-breaking asides. These asides are our only understanding of Cami as a person and Marano’s surfeit of Disney Channel pep makes these moments less Fleabag and more Dora the Explorer.
Cami’s choices range from the mundane – truth or dare? Should her niece stand up to her bully or not? – to the extreme – should Cami cross the picket line? Which man should she choose? It’s a bit like playing The Sims if you were only given access to the most boring options imaginable. Honestly, Choose Love would be vastly improved if we could do things like remove the doors and windows to Cami’s house or start random oven fires.
On paper this all sounds like it has the potential to be fun but after about seven minutes it becomes unbearably tedious. Despite being advertised as less than 80 minutes long, the myriad alternative decisions in Choose Love means there’s no runtime displayed, making the film’s slight length feel closer to that of Sátántangó. It doesn’t really help that the only actor Laura Marano has chemistry with is Avan Jogia. Also, as Rex is a multi-millionaire with a private jet, the decision you’re expected to make as a viewer is a bit of a no-brainer, if only to give the poor woman some financial security.
I can barely make my own life decisions so watching this was extremely stressful, to the point where it’s hard to even qualify Choose Love as a movie. Reading all the alternative endings afterwards and knowing everyone watched a different film makes my skin itch. The whole fun of a ‘will-they-won’t-they’ romcom is in the protagonist eventually making the decision best suited for them. Cami isn’t really a character and because of the gimmicky format she has even less interiority than the average Netflix romcom protagonist. There’s no grief over her dead mother or family home to save from repossession. It’s like watching a film designed by AI or the feature-length version of those weird mobile game ads about pregnant women who get cheated on.
Part of cinema is experiencing some form of closure or payoff, and Choose Love provides none of that. It is such a uniquely strange, unsatisfying experience that feels a bit like being stuck in an elevator. You exert so much needless mental effort because of it and when it’s finally over you’re simply relieved you can move on with your life.
