Natalie (Lili Reinhart) is an ambitious senior with her future mapped out. But after a one-night stand leads to vomiting, she decides to take a pregnancy test.
“Look Both Ways,” a misguided Netflix drama, stages this moment as a crossroads. It envisions divergent futures for our heroine: one in which her test is negative and another in which it is positive.
The film mimics the thought experiment performed in ‘Sliding Doors’ and intersects scenes from these two destinies. The first finds Natalie on a road trip to Los Angeles with her bestie, Cara (Aisha Dee), where she pursues a job in animation. At the same time, a parallel Natalie grimly resigns herself to motherhood and moves home to raise the baby alongside her grumpy parents (Andrea Savage and Luke Wilson).
In handy, cinematic shorthand, director Wanuri Kahiu distinguishes between the two realms through color, applying red to the set design of Natalie’s exciting Hollywood adventures and blues to those of her lonelier Texas motherhood.
That an accessible third course of action — an abortion — is essentially ignored by both Natalie and the screenwriter, April Prosser, is a mind-boggling factor in this otherwise predictable film. It’s shocking to see Natalie’s unplanned pregnancy introduced as a cool dose of reality rather than a decision to be made, and the film’s release after Roe only makes matters worse.
Never mind that “Look Both Ways” seems to state that, for women, child rearing and careers are in relative opposition – when Natalie comes to a fork in the road, the film barely makes her look either way. It pushes her down one path, and then another.
Looking both ways
Not judged. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
