REVIEW: ‘Faithfully Yours’ Is Painfully Dull

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If you’re going to give us a murder-cheating mystery, you simply must make it one of two things: sexy or thrilling. Faithfully Yours, a Netflix Original Dutch-language directed by André van Duren is, unfortunately, neither. Instead, it is a dull, dim tale that offers little reason to endure it.

Faithfully Yours is billed as a romantic thriller but it is truly neither of those things. Two best friends Bodil (Bracha van Doesburgh) and Isabel (Elise Schaap) have a pact where they go on trips away from their husbands together, leave their cell phones with each other, and spend the time cheating on their husbands. It’s kind of a cool idea on its own, but in practice, there is nothing interesting about any of the people or their relationships to speak of. The editing is also awkward and jumps around in the beginning, preventing me from latching onto any corner of the affairs, and the lighting is so poor that I could barely tell what was happening in detail in some important moments throughout.

The thriller and mystery aspect is just as dull as the sex. The entire movie is premised on a bad liar lying to the police about her affair. She’s constantly throwing her friend under the bus, has obnoxiously obvious tells when she lies, and never for a second left me rooting for her to get away with anything, because I never felt like there were consequences if she got caught. So she gets in trouble with her husband? She goes to jail? I’m not given any reason to care about either of them and every moment spent trying to uncover the truth is so boring — her misadventure couldn’t have felt like it mattered less. She could have just told the cop the truth at the start about her cheating pact and literally none of the time I wasted watching this movie would have been misspent. I never want to be watching a movie where the one-note cop is the person I sympathize with the most, but I felt just as bad for Bodil wasting her time as I did for her wasting mine.

Really there is little redeeming or worthwhile about Faithfully Yours. Just don’t watch it. Even by the time it gets to the end and two reasonable twists take place, it’s already far too late for them to redeem what is just entirely dull from the onset. It’s not a bad movie so much as it’s just a bad movie to spend an hour and a half with. Spend it watching literally anything else.

Faithfully Yours is streaming now on Netflix.