Love Type D (2019 | United Kingdom | 95 mins | Sasha Collington)
I had really high hopes for this quirky British comedy about a woman, Frankie (Maeve Dermody), who is sick and tired of being dumped. We meet her as she’s left by her “perfect man” via his little brother Wilbur (yes, he broke up with her by proxy) and through some awkward interactions with this little messenger (Rory Stroud) , she finds out there may be a gene that consistently makes you the dumpee at the end of a relationship rather than the dumper. For the rest of the film she tries to fix this defect.
I want to preface this with the fact that I love British comedy (and Australian comedy for that matter), more than almost any other genre, so I was doubly disappointed by the stumbling, awkward, and often cringe-worthy moments that lead us through Frankie’s journey. I’m all for awkward silences, dry, witty, slightly self-deprecating humor, and ridiculous story-lines… all of which this film has. But there was no defining moment, no epiphany of self-redemption, and in the meantime she stalked this “perfect man” of hers to a degree that I was hiding my face during several scenes. It wasn’t adorable stalking, like mooning over him from afar with goofy outcomes. It was straight-up, I’m in your face, crying on your shoulder, can’t get over you type stalking and it made me dislike a character we should otherwise be totally infatuated with.
My fellow Sunbreaker Jenn was a little more forgiving in her review for 2021 SIFF, but I just couldn’t love it as much as I wanted to. Dermody was fantastic; she played it, I suspect, exactly as she was directed to. As an actor I found her very sweet and charming, but they played her down, as they tend to do in films like this, mousy and annoying with no better qualities to make you love her. All the weird uncomfortable sequences went on way too long (like lying to hospital staff so she can drill information out of someone in a coma or stalking a twelve-year-old to get more info about her ex) and these scenes just reiterated that the character actually deserves to be alone until she figures out how to love herself (which didn’t really happen by the end credits) so it just fell flat. I’m giving it three stars because of Dermody and Stroud did their best to create a quirky story out of the disjointed concept they were given.
Love Type D is available for Video On Demand 7/9