Satellite (Film) Review
We liked?
Not so much?
“They had it all. They wanted more.” As Satellite begins, viewers watch a girl creep on someone she’s never met. She’s follows him onto the subway, watches his conversation from the street, and gazes at him from her stool as he sits in a bar. Creepy, yes. The beginning of a Fatal Attraction-esque stalker […]
“They had it all. They wanted more.”
As Satellite begins, viewers watch a girl creep on someone she’s never met. She’s follows him onto the subway, watches his conversation from the street, and gazes at him from her stool as he sits in a bar. Creepy, yes. The beginning of a Fatal Attraction-esque stalker film? No – well, not intentionally anyway. What happens instead, is that the guy (Kevin) gets up and invites the girl (Ro) to his table. They talk, hang out, and fall in love – and then things really get weird.
Various portions of the film are narrated by a child’s voice, and part of the whole deal is trying to figure out who she is. Their future child? A friend? No references are made to her as the film carries out, since it is really a story of their falling in love and deciding whether to stay together. But all of that is really kind of creepy as well. When the two of them decide to make a go of things, there are two caveats that really define their relationship and how things play out. Ro demands that Kevin never, ever lie to her, and states things will be over if he ever does. And, the two also decide (somewhat bizarrely), that if one sees the other going down a path they don’t like, they can dare the other to do things – if they refuse, they must walk away from the relationship immediately.
As you can imagine, this makes for some pretty much messed up interactions between the two. From quitting their jobs to committing crimes to adultery – anything can be asked of the other, and they are so convinced they cannot live without each other that losing the relationship is apparently worse than losing who you are and your right to personal morals. And all of that makes for a pretty cool exploration into human character, how far people will go for love, insecurity, and any number of really cool things that they decided not to actually do in this film. It’s like they took a story of the most messed up love affair they could think of and played it straight.
No fooling, Satellite is meant to be a romance, and I just had a hard time wrapping my head around that. The two characters have some serious issues that are greatly magnified when they are together. It’s a toxic relationship held up as an ideal, and it just didn’t work for me. I found the interactions of the two lovers felt like a buildup to some logical conclusion that never happened. Instead, the ending will just leave you absolutely shaking your head. It’s an interesting film, and you really won’t see a lot of it coming, but it just doesn’t live up to its potential – as either a great modern romance or a story of toxic love – simply because it tries to be both.