What Love Looks Like

This was a fun, sweet little indie, and it's nice to see the anthology format being used here - it's a great storytelling tool, and not enough movies try to use it! This was a fun watch, definitely worth checking out, especially with V-Day right around the corner.

Not only impressing with likable characters, good humour and down-to-earth emotion, What Love Looks Like is a heartfelt and wonderfully honest romantic film that never shies away from a passionate ode to love, no matter how cheesy it may seem.

Interweaving romances is such a common trope on the big screen, from the likes of Love Actually to The Holiday, Stuck In Love and countless A-lister mash-ups like New Year's Day and Valentine's Day.

And all of those films tell ham-fisted and cheesy stories that supposedly look at love in all forms, but in truth do little more than recapture boring and predictable clichés that we've seen a thousand times.

What Love Looks Like, however, somehow manages to take a painfully tired formula and not only breathe new life into it, but also really impress with heartfelt and genuine emotional depth.

Following five different stories of love and romance, the film sets itself up to be just another cheesy romantic drama, but I can't stress just how surprised I was by how good What Love Looks Like turned out to be.

At first, telling five stories simultaneously seems to spread the film a little too thin, as it looks at different forms of love in individual and separate spheres.

In that, the film in its early stages feels a little bit like Crash, looking separately at different stories that in effect are little more than caricatures of themselves, from the tale of young love blossoming to a frustrated relationship and more.

But where the film really makes things work is in its excellent screenplay, which features interesting, multi-dimensional characters that show a lot more than just one side of love at a time.

From relatable romantic tropes to the odd enjoyable cliché, What Love Looks Like actually gets down to the bottom of what love is far better than any film before it, delivering captivating and pleasantly heartfelt emotional drama all the way through that overcomes any sense of cheesiness without an issue.

Director Alex Magaña does a fantastic job of handling what is always a complex structure to get right, giving each of the film's many characters due focus and attention throughout, while pacing the movie to such an extent that it never even feels like your average romantic anthology, but really feels like it weaves together perfectly.

And even if all the characters don't meet, the thematic similarities and mirroring between each of the stories help link it all together brilliantly, ingeniously making the film feel whole without resorting to a cheesy finale that ties it all up in an easy bow for you to enjoy.

As a result, What Love Looks Like is an excellent romantic film that improves on a terrible Hollywood trope by providing likable characters, fun humour and genuinely fantastic drama and depth. It's captivating, heartfelt and wonderfully honest, playing on genre clichés while actually getting to the bottom of its main theme.

This film is a great date night film. I loved the sincerity and passion of the characters. It was not only a nod to love but also a love story for Los Angeles. It was very relatable and honest. Definitely check it out. It will pull your heartstrings.

It is clear they paid attention to sound and lighting, giving this project a high production value, and for an independent film, this is a pleasant surprise. The acting, and writing, wasn't always desirable, occasionally directing my pupils to the nearest clock, but the pros outweighed the cons in this regard, especially near the end.

In this story, we get to follow five separate relationships, two of which felt redundant, or perhaps uninteresting would be the term, but luckily, they still had three strong story lines to keep our attention. Love stories need characters worth investing in, and I'm happy to report the three aforementioned couples were investment worthy.

With a title as absolute as, "What Love Looks Like," for a film made in 2020, one would think there would be at least one gay couple, and being as there were two expendable couples, both hetero, it's not like they ran out of room. Although the lack of preference diversity did hurt the overall rating for me, it did not affect the validity of the three aforementioned relationship stories.

In short, all this film needs is to clean up the script a little, allow the actors a little more time to explore their characters, and to replace two of the couples with one gay couple, male or female, and we'll have ourselves a 10'er!

One of those rare films that hits all the right emotional notes! It's not often a film can make me laugh, cry and fall in love. Bravo!