The Riverdale star plays out two different futures after an unexpected pregnancy in this warm but imbalanced exploration of ‘what if?’
hat if?” is a reliably magnetic question. What if you got rejected instead of accepted, took one job over another, cut and run on a lover or stuck it out? The non-Marvel multiverse potential is the evergreen hook of Idina Menzel’s Broadway vehicle If/Then, the NBC series Ordinary Joe, and Netflix’s new film Look Both Ways, in which Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart plays a recent college graduate whose unexpected pregnancy splinters her life into two distinct trajectories.
Instead, the sliding door in this one-hour-and-50-minute film is whether or not Natalie gets pregnant . In timeline A, the test is negative and Natalie goes on to Los Angeles with her best friend Cara in pursuit of her dream to be a Hollywood animator. In timeline B, the tests are positive and a stunned Natalie immediately tells Gabe . She summarily decides that it’s fate – “it just feels like something that I have to do, like this was supposed to happen” – and moves back in with her parents .
There’s an imbalance between the two timelines, which cover five years and smoothly intersect: the LA timeline has the texture of reality, the motherhood plot the haze of fantasy. Childless in LA, Natalie wheedles her way into a job as an assistant to her hero, animation studio boss Lucy , begins dating a hot older co-worker, Jake , and struggles to, as Lucy bluntly puts it, “find her voice” in animation.
The motherhood timeline feel comparatively thin; Prosser’s script doesn’t give us much insight into who Natalie was before the pregnancy, other than she’s type A with a detailed five-year plan, or why she would have a baby at 22. It has the weightlessness of speculation, sanitized for a montage. Motherhood Natalie feels left out while scrolling through her childless peers’ lives on Instagram, struggles with her sense of self and making space for the drawing that was once her purpose.
Still, the film is an easy watch; Kahiu favors warm colors, easy listening and chapter breaks via animated title slides. Seeing two Reinharts seamlessly pass each other by in the same frame offers a mild dopamine hit. But the film’s ace is Reinhart, who has delivered enough batshit lines on Riverdale with complete commitment to make the script’s broad cliches or clunky exposition work.
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