Netflix’s multiverse fantasy Look Both Ways has the exact wrong message for the moment
If nothing else, the new Netflix production Look Both Ways gives the Groundhog Day formula a much-needed break. For a while, a Groundhog-like time-loop scenario was the go-to device for applying a light sense of the fantastical to stories about choices, fate, and relationships. There seemed to be at least one time-loop movie for each streaming service: Palm Springs, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, Boss Level, Naked, and so on. Look Both Ways instead borrows from 1987’s Blind Chance, a Krzysztof Kieślowski movie where a young man catching or missing a train creates parallel timelines with very different lives. (It was reenvisioned in America as the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors.) The branching incident for Look Both Ways isn’t a train, though: It’s the outcome of a graduation-season hookup between college friends Natalie (Lili Reinhart) and Gabe (Danny Ramirez).
When Natalie feels sick on graduation night, she takes a pregnancy test. In one timeline, it’s a false alarm, and she proceeds with her “five-year plan,” which involves moving to Los Angeles with her bestie Cara (Aisha Dee) and pursuing her dream of becoming a professional animator. In the other, Natalie is pregnant, and she moves to Texas to live with her parents (Andrea Savage and Luke Wilson), throwing herself into co-parenting with a nearby (but not exactly romantically involved) Gabe.
Like other “what if this happened differently” thought-experiment movies, Look Both Ways is an opportunity to explore the vagaries of life choices both major and minor. But this film skims across the surface of those choices, philosophizing with all the zip, vigor, and intelligence of a flavorless rom-com. Or rather, two flavorless rom-coms: One has Natalie doing a
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