Life Itself Review: 2 Ups & 8 Downs

1. It Ignores Its Own Message

In Abby's thesis on the unreliable narrator, she (laughably) hypothesizes that life itself is the ultimate unreliable narrator. That life can seem as if it is taking you in one direction only for it to then completely pull the rug out from under you at the last minute. Or to put it more plainly, life has no overarching plan, it simply exists.

This is the ground upon which the entire film is built. It's the reason the opening sequence exists, it's the reason the film spends so much time attempting to misdirect the audience. And yet, the film somehow misses out on this message altogether.

Because the two seemingly disparate strands of the story don't just collide together in a single moment by some happenstance, they become integral parts of one another. Rodrigo's family goes to New York and is on the bus that kills Abby, whose daughter Dylan then grows up to fall in love with Rodrigo.

Not only is this an unbelievably major coincidence, but it also flies in the face of everything the film is attempting to say. Because according to the actual text of the film, life isn't an unreliable narrator, its the author of a too-ridiculous-for-a-Lifetime-movie screenplay.

And now on to the positives...