REVIEW: ‘Love Forever (2025)’ Is A New Low For Netflix Originals

Love Forever (2025) (Kärlek Fårever) by Staffan Lindberg is a new low for Netflix Original movies. It is so deeply uninspired that there is hardly a plot to synopsize. Where most Netflix and other platforms in the streaming era of trash movies at least try to take unique approaches to their respective genres, Love Forever is as bland as it possibly gets. It’s a basic and bleak movie about Hanna (Matilda Källström) and Samuel (Charlie Gustafsson), a bride and husband-to-be whose wedding plans go awry when Samuel’s backcountry parents get in the way of their simple plans with traditions they hold dear.

First and foremost, Love Forever has a problem. From the first few minutes, it is clear that Hanna and Samuel have no business getting married. To be fair, this is the movie’s own stance, too, but that makes the movie even more boring.

Not only do they have no clear chemistry or connection with one another, but they barely appear on screen together for the first half of the movie. They also have only been dating for a year, and Hanna has never met Samuel’s clearly overbearing family. Having a wedding on the remote land of a family you have never even interacted with before is patently absurd.

Even removing the stupidity of the circumstances from the equation, it seems quite clear that neither Hanna nor Samuel are happy with a single aspect of their wedding arrangements before they even begin, let alone their relationship. It’s not fun to watch these two people interact with each other or with anybody else around them. Especially Hanna’s own parents, who couldn’t be more miserable together if they tried and who are both insufferable from the moment they first appear.

Love Forever (2025) is a new low for Netflix originals.

Samuel’s parents have traditional names and ideas for their child’s wedding that make everyone uncomfortable, while Hanna’s parents make fun of the traditional names and make everyone uncomfortable. It’s insufferable. And unfortunately, so are the other side characters, of which there are too many. Samuel has a brother, Christian (Vilhelm Blomgren), who makes crude jokes and drags Samuel down to his level. Hanna has a best friend, Linda (Doreen Ndagire), with no discernable personality other than having once had a thing with Samuel’s best friend, Marco (Philip Oros).

With the amount of focus put on that relationship, it’s almost like Love Forever was supposed to be about Linda and Marco in the first place. Perhaps that would have at least been a somewhat more inspired approach to the story. The movie constantly shows their pining for each other, how annoying Linda’s current boyfriend is, and how clearly Linda and Marco should be together. Instead, the movie is left with a dull wedding speech, cliche mishaps, and barely anything to cling to.

The movie’s pacing doesn’t help either. Every six minutes or so, there is a corny line to end the scene and then a needle drop with an equally corny English folk pop song or an occasional instrumental track. It constantly breaks up the movie’s pace in a way that might be natural, but it’s quickly aggravating. It’s a punctuation mark on the end of scene after scene that doesn’t earn a punctuation mark.

Love Forever knows that it’s bad, and that makes it worse.

The singular kudos the movie earns is that, at one point, Samuel’s parents sing the couple an original song. The song was written and recorded in multiple languages so that viewers utilizing Netflix’s multiple full dubs of the movie can hear the perfectly decent song in their language of choice. This is not a feature unique to Love Forever. Netflix often creates separate versions of original songs for its different dubs in its original content.

On the one hand, it’s a great feature for folks watching this dubbed, but on the other hand, it portends the wider Netflix trend of publishing content that can be consumed without actively watching it whatsoever. If the English dub is running and the song doesn’t suddenly switch to Swedish, multi-tasking viewers won’t become jarred by the sudden change and continue half-watching in peace. The debate over the trend of dispassionate viewing is good for movies aside; it’s clear that Love Forever is more interested in spending money making the movie “viewable” to more international audiences than in making the movie actually good.

Love Forever is as low as Netflix Original movies get. The movie is deeply uninspired, painfully trite, and barely worth the 90 minutes. A rom-com doesn’t have to be great to be entertaining. But it does need to have something that drives it—a twist, a distinct voice, or a unique circumstance. Love Forever has none of that. It’s as bland as can possibly be, wasting time with a conclusion obvious from the first few minutes.

Love Forever is available to stream exclusively on Netflix.