Faithfully Yours follows two middle-aged friends, Bodil (Bracha van Doesburgh) and Isabel (Elise Schaap) who use each other as alibis to sneak off and enjoy extramarital affairs.
The film opens with Bodil and Isabel meeting up at a train station in the Netherlands to go on a weekend trip to Ostend, a Belgian seaside resort. They've agreed to use each other as alibis so that their husbands won't find out about their cheating. Isabel's hubby, a depressed, forlorn, very needy writer, has placed a tracker on her phone, so there's a lot of scheming to make sure he does not know where she's really going.
As soon as they hit town they go their separate ways. Bodil, a family court judge and mom, hooks up with a young, handsome professor from the local university who is an expert on - irony of ironies - lying. Clearly she should know better.
Fortyish Isabel puts on her glitter makeup goes to a sleazy nightclub where she does drugs, hands over a huge cash payment to an unidentified man, and makes out with a young woman. Later that night, Isabel goes missing.
And that's when the planning and web of lies unravels. The next day Bodil discovers the scene of a violent, bloody struggle at her beach house. She reluctantly calls the police and then lies about pretty much everything else.
But the Belgian police are not exactly Lieutenant Colombos. The two women detectives take a quite passive approach to their sleuthing. The attitude seems to be, "Yeah, sure that makes sense." The biggest admonition is not to leave Belgium.
In fact pretty much every character in this movie is a 1 on the 1 to 10 passive to aggressive scale. No one seems especially troubled by any startling reveal, or strange behavior. Bodil's hubby: Oh, you've had 10 or 12 lovers at the beach house? I'm down with that. I enjoy the videos. Just don't drift too far away from me. A huge Irish Wolfhound runs up to an elderly man almost knocking him over and puts his bloody paws all over the guy's white suit? Bodil just looks slightly quizzical and goes on her way. Isabel's husband tries to commit suicide by taking a barrel full of pills and is near death? Bodil's husband: let's not bother with emergency services. He'll be OK. Bodil discovers there has been a violent crime, maybe murder / hit job at her home? Oh, I'll just spend another few days here, alone. None of the characters are likable, several are detestable.
Maybe this passivity and blind acceptance of the outrageous is a Dutch / Belgian thing, but American audiences will find it hard to fathom. And in this era of culture wars, the disdain shown to men will be especially jarring. The two male leads are ineffectual beta-males in the extreme. The five women, in their way, are the only competent ones.
Add to that a number of implausibilities - e.g., a child having the password to his dad's computer which is loaded with disturbing material - and plot holes, then mix with a kettle full of red herrings, and you get a sadly disappointing movie.
As for the ending, well, like the rest of the film, pretty far fetched. It's more or less wrapped up in a two minute conversation / exposition scene outside the beach house and then a ludicrous airport scene. I give it points for the premise, but negative points for execution. Hitchcock it is not.
