As I’ve mentioned on this site before, I am a huge supporter of physical media. Simply subscribing to a service like Netflix and being at the mercy of whatever licenses they decide to renew does not interest me: I want to be able to view the movies that I love whenever I want, not whenever it was lucrative for a third party. I’ve never understood people who look at movies and television as mere diversions, all equal as long as they can keep you from boredom for a couple of hours.

What I DO love about the digital subscription model, however, is having the ability to find something you are completely unaware of and watch it on a whim. In a world where major film releases are accompanied by massive ad campaigns intent on spoiling every aspect of the movie in question (see: Terminator Genisys), it can be a joy to just pick out a movie (possibly one recommended to you by Netflix’s scarily-accurate prediction algorithm), not read anything about it, and enjoy the narrative the way that the writer(s) intended. This was the experience I had with The One I Love, a film that I would highly recommend to others.

I’ll go a bit more into detail about the movie in a “spoiler” section below, but if you have not seen The One I Love, you should avoid that section and see it cold. The plot follows a couple (Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss) who, at the recommendation of a therapist, decides to go to a weekend vacation home and sort out their recent issues. All you need to know is that it is a film about relationships, our views of our significant others, and the difference between our early idealized concepts of them and the actual people we come to see them as. It is also far more fun to watch than that description sounds, but I cannot tell you why.

So turn on your Chromecast/Apple TV/Roku/game system/whatever you use for Netflix (but not your phone or tablet, because come on, you’re better than that), fire up The One I Love, and enjoy it for yourself. Then come back here and read the below section for a more thorough review.

SPOILER SECTION

While I enjoyed this movie for the thematic ideas mentioned above, I especially loved the progression of the story. The film really takes its time exploring each step along the way, and what it means for the characters. Take, for instance, the way that they leave and come back upon discovering that the guest house contains idealized versions of their significant others, only present when they enter alone. The idea scares them at first, but is appealing to Elizabeth Moss’s Sophie and intellectually intriguing to Mark Duplass’s Ethan.

The differences between their individual sessions with the ideal partners are interesting, too, because of their different approaches. Sophie is far more interested in exploring her relationship with fake Ethan because it gives her insight into her state with real Ethan. Her gradual move away from her real-life partner is because of clarity provided by her time with the “idea” that she always loved in the first place. Meanwhile, Ethan has no interest in what is largely a fantasy to him: he just wants to get to the bottom of the situation. In a way, they mirror the audience and the different ways that viewers may appreciate the movie: as a thought exercise about what we love and choose to love about others, and as a science fiction premise that we have to “solve.”

As the movie goes on, it does justice to both aspects of the narrative. When Ethan and Sophie return to the main house and discover both of their ideals sitting and waiting for them, it’s a real shocker. What had been primarily a mental exercise up until that point starts to take a greater shape because the extra Ethan and Sophie are not just figments of their imaginations, but actual people with their own thoughts and desires. Meanwhile, the movie uses the foursome to examine not only the conflict between somebody’s idealized version of their lover and the actual person, but the conflict the lover would have with a “perfect” version of himself or herself.

If anything, the movie tips a bit too far toward science fiction after this point, when we realize that the guest house versions of Ethan and Sophie are actually the previous couple to enter the vacation home. This brings up a number of questions that the movie does not answer (Is their personality an affectation put on through research? Do they stop pretending when they get to leave? Does their appearance go back to what it was before? Do they take on the lives of the current guest house residents? How is the therapist involved?) and leads to some pretty crazy high-concept gags (such as the force field holding them in).

But the movie ultimately succeeds with its premise by still keeping Ethan and Sophie’s decisions at the center. The whole movie hinges on Sophie’s decision to either go back with the real Ethan or stay with fantasy Ethan. Its ending, in which Ethan is out with a woman he believed to be his Sophie but which may actually be the guest house version, is somewhat analogous to the ending in Inception. Both films end with the idea that a protagonist may be living in a world of fantasy, and in both cases the important question is not whether the final scenario is “real” but whether its reality matters. In Ethan’s case, he has spent the whole movie denying guest house Sophie, because she was a fantasy and he loved the real thing. But if the fantasy becomes indiscernible from the reality (as it does here, and in Inception), then does it matter if it’s real? Or is our own perception the closest we can ever come to reality?

The One I Love is not interested in the answer to that question, so much as the question itself. It is a wholly unique film and a hidden gem in the Netflix library.