Look Both Ways (2022)
Oh, Netflix. Rom-coms can be great, but don’t be Lifetime, Netflix. Please don’t. That’s not a place you want to go.
Fortunately, this is not the case with Look Both Ways, which kicks Lifetime’s hiney in many respects.
Natalie is about to graduate from her Texas university, and to celebrate, she and her best guy friend, Gabe, decide to sleep together. Next thing we see, she’s upchucking in her sorority house bathroom and her friend, Cara is bringing her pregnancy tests while Gabe pounds it out on the drums with the band downstairs.
Suddenly we see two Natalies side by side. One is pregnant and one isn’t. One goes home to her parents in Austin, while the other one zips off to LA with Cara to work in animation. LA Natalie gets a job as an assistant to Lily, a prestigious animator and meets a guy, Jake, while Gabe makes his own way as a drummer back in Texas. Austin Natalie has a little girl, Roe, and stumbles through wakeful nights and co-parenting with Gabe, who she’s not sure she should be with.
The movie isn’t without conflict and makes its points subtly, with nothing ever sinking too low. It ends happily. In its favor, it doesn’t hit the viewer over the head about which of Natalie’s two possible lives is the superior one. I also like that the film doesn’t portray an unplanned pregnancy as a death sentence or a baby as a parasite.
Like I said, it’s cute. Lili Reinhart is terrific as Natalie, not to mention she’s the spitting image of Brittany Murphy, which isn’t a bad thing. And as Variety pointed out, the movie deftly delineates between Natalie’s two lives very subtly by their respective color palettes (Austin Natalie favors blue, while LA Natalie wears a lot of pink).
However, Look Both Ways does have its problems, mostly from a narrative standpoint. It could stand to be about twenty minutes shorter, for one thing, and the idea of dual existences has been done many times before. The film is more than a little derivative of Sliding Doors, only Sliding Doors is widely considered to be the superior film.
And while the film leaves the audience to make up their minds about Natalie’s future, the balance does seem to tip in favor of LA. Natalie’s chemistry with Jake is a little sparkier in my opinion than what she had with Gabe. The latter is her friend, and while they’re good together, she seems to grow a little more with Jake because he gets her out of her comfort zone, and there’s a scene with goats that’s pretty funny.
I kept hoping that something would show that Natalie is aware of her life’s possiblities somehow, or that there could be some kind of Freaky Friday-type moment where the two existences meld suddenly, but aside from a few character crossovers and sorta-plot intersections everything stays compartmentalized.
Another trick that might have been effective would be to have Natalie imagining her two possible future selves standing in front of her after they’ve each gone through their respective character arcs, and then she turns the pregnancy test over, with the film cutting to the ending credits before we see the results. The movie leaves this door open but never walks through it. It’s such a missed opportunity.
All in all, Look Both Ways is a fun film that goes down easily even if it is a little bit long. If Netflix keeps putting out movies like this, it won’t be long before the folks at Lifetime get very nervous.
Look Both Ways is currently streaming on Netflix. Rated TV-14.
My grade: B
Principal cast: Lili Reinhart, Danny Ramirez, Aisha Dee, Andrea Savage, Luke Wilson, David Corenswet, Nia Long
Directed by Wanuri Kahiu.
Written by April Prosser.