Faithfully Yours

Faithfully Yours follows two middle-aged friends, Bodil (Bracha van Doesburgh) and Isabel (Elise Schaap) who use each other as alibis to sneak off and enjoy extramarital affairs.

The film opens with Bodil and Isabel meeting up at a train station in the Netherlands to go on a weekend trip to Ostend, a Belgian seaside resort. They've agreed to use each other as alibis so that their husbands won't find out about their cheating. Isabel's hubby, a depressed, forlorn, very needy writer, has placed a tracker on her phone, so there's a lot of scheming to make sure he does not know where she's really going.

As soon as they hit town they go their separate ways. Bodil, a family court judge and mom, hooks up with a young, handsome professor from the local university who is an expert on - irony of ironies - lying. Clearly she should know better.

Fortyish Isabel puts on her glitter makeup goes to a sleazy nightclub where she does drugs, hands over a huge cash payment to an unidentified man, and makes out with a young woman. Later that night, Isabel goes missing.

And that's when the planning and web of lies unravels. The next day Bodil discovers the scene of a violent, bloody struggle at her beach house. She reluctantly calls the police and then lies about pretty much everything else.

But the Belgian police are not exactly Lieutenant Colombos. The two women detectives take a quite passive approach to their sleuthing. The attitude seems to be, "Yeah, sure that makes sense." The biggest admonition is not to leave Belgium.

In fact pretty much every character in this movie is a 1 on the 1 to 10 passive to aggressive scale. No one seems especially troubled by any startling reveal, or strange behavior. Bodil's hubby: Oh, you've had 10 or 12 lovers at the beach house? I'm down with that. I enjoy the videos. Just don't drift too far away from me. A huge Irish Wolfhound runs up to an elderly man almost knocking him over and puts his bloody paws all over the guy's white suit? Bodil just looks slightly quizzical and goes on her way. Isabel's husband tries to commit suicide by taking a barrel full of pills and is near death? Bodil's husband: let's not bother with emergency services. He'll be OK. Bodil discovers there has been a violent crime, maybe murder / hit job at her home? Oh, I'll just spend another few days here, alone. None of the characters are likable, several are detestable.

Maybe this passivity and blind acceptance of the outrageous is a Dutch / Belgian thing, but American audiences will find it hard to fathom. And in this era of culture wars, the disdain shown to men will be especially jarring. The two male leads are ineffectual beta-males in the extreme. The five women, in their way, are the only competent ones.

Add to that a number of implausibilities - e.g., a child having the password to his dad's computer which is loaded with disturbing material - and plot holes, then mix with a kettle full of red herrings, and you get a sadly disappointing movie.

As for the ending, well, like the rest of the film, pretty far fetched. It's more or less wrapped up in a two minute conversation / exposition scene outside the beach house and then a ludicrous airport scene. I give it points for the premise, but negative points for execution. Hitchcock it is not.

The premise is interesting - two women using each other as an alibi and then things go wrong. There are a few unreasonable parts of the movie which don't make sense, as other reviewers have said. And yes, I agree, the ending was ridiculous. The acting is not good.

However, I was genuinely entertained. I kept trying to figure out what was happening and who was the bad guy. The movie gets points for that - it's not obvious who the bad guy is, and really, depending on how you define "bad guy," it really gets iffy.

Speaking of which, the characters aren't likable. None of them. So really, the big positives here are story and mystery. And that part was done very well.

Positive surprise from a Dutch movie production. Strong characters, with a complex psychological background that makes it believable that they do what they do. Bracha delivers a top performance, and Elise is good as usual.

We couldn't see any surreal plotholes or silliness from the main character. Under normal circumstances people may choose differently, but here its not clear whom to trust. The idea that a judge would fall through the cracks and find herself in a position of suspicion makes it extra interesting.

This movie maintained a constant tension of "what will happen next?". While some critics called it painfully slow we didn't experience that at all. Instead, it's never clear what will happen next or how the story will end. This kept us hooked in.

The end isnt your typical ending, which is something I love to see, but its wrap up was very brief and could have used an extra scene or two. Overall enjoyed a good movie night!

There are a lot of good and compelling elements in this Dutch thriller. Two woman go away on a romantic weekend with their lovers, instead of their husbands and one is murdered. It is low budget, but it is engaging and interesting to watch how their romantic deception unravels their families' lives in the midst of the murder. I did have an issue with the main character's reaction to her friends murder, although otherwise I found the acting to be good. I am not sure if a murder investigation is treated as casually outside of the United States as it appears to be here, but that issue unnerved me, a little, when watching. It has twists, which keep it interesting. But, not necessarily, more believable. I do think it is good filmmaking-the cinematography and the Direction are smart. It does keep you guessing, but in the end is messier than it needs to be.

This had a lot of plot elements; each of which could have been more fully explored to make a great film, but all were used at once so the plot was jumbled and not believable. For example the idea of the women deceiving their husbands and then one of them suspected of murder but not able to prove her innocence because of the previously fabricated events would be a good film. As would one of the husbands secretly monitoring his wife's every move to create the perfect murder. Unfortunately the film did not exploit any of these ideas in depth, but glossed over them in order to introduce more, unnecessary twists. Unfortunately the casual approach to the investigation by the police and the idea that Bodil Backer was supposed to be a judge were almost laughable.