‘Choose Love’ Review: Pick Your Own Cliché

Netflix’s newest interactive film, “Choose Love,” is an try to use a relationship simulator expertise to a standard-issue rom-com. Its choose-your-own-adventure interface — just like the one within the 2019 “Black Mirror” film “Bandersnatch,” one other Netflix manufacturing — permits viewers to make choices for Cami Conway (Laura Marano), a younger lady who instantly finds herself having to decide on between three suitors. The decisions that viewers choose with the press of a button (Should Cami kiss this man or dodge his advances? Should she put on this gown or that one?) will in the end inform which man she finally ends up with.

Except, there’s not as a lot selection left to the viewer as meets the attention. The film’s opening scene is a tarot studying the place you get to assist Cami determine whether or not she needs “good news” or “bad news” first. But both manner, it’s the identical set of playing cards. After a pleasing however banal double-date evening together with her long-term boyfriend, Paul (Scott Michael Foster), she runs into an erstwhile highschool heartthrob, Jack (Jordi Webber), whereas dropping her niece off at college, studying that he’s now an expert photographer with humanitarian priorities. He takes photos of kids for charity.

She meets her third suitor, a well-known pop musician named Rex Galier (Avan Jogia), when he rents out area on the recording studio the place she works as a sound engineer. Rex asks for her recommendation on a brand new monitor he’s producing, and — whether or not or not you decide “lie and say it’s good” or “brutal honesty” — he takes a liking to her experience and asks her to file with him. Cami’s longtime dream of a singing profession is reawakened, and she or he finds herself confronted with three potential life paths: play it protected, reconnect with the one who acquired away or chase stardom with a well-known beau.

The interactive options in “Choose Love” kind of boil down to 2 or three pivotal scenes that decide which man Cami will spend her life with — and naturally, because the credit roll, Netflix encourages you to return and click on a special button for an alternate ending. If solely the movie had been compelling sufficient to warrant that.

While “Bandersnatch” and Netflix’s different makes an attempt at interactive storytelling, just like the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” particular “Kimmy vs. The Reverend,” weren’t with out their flaws, their unpredictability — whether or not by way of dystopian thrills or comedic timing — saved the gimmick considerably afloat. But the primary promoting level of “Choose Love,” directed by Stuart McDonald, appears to be that viewers get to choose which stale rom-com trope they see play out onscreen. Predictability apart, “Choose Love” resembles much less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a collection of disconnected, shallow interactions, every resulting in a special predetermined cliché.

Choose Love
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Netflix.