Love Wants Us Dead – Review

Director: Israel Perez

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

Love Wants Us Dead is most definitely both an arthouse film and a slow burn and, as such, it may put many a viewer off. However, it is skilfully photographed and director Israel Perez manages to keep the viewer engaged, though little happens. Also, with a 65 minute running time it really doesn’t outstay its welcome.

We start in a car with Anais (Wendy Zhuo) – note I have got the character names from IMDb, the characters are not named in film. She eventually stops to retrieve a bag and then walk to a derelict building and film on a hand-cam. We see that, at one point, she films a chicken dead and strung from above. Eventually she goes back towards the car. There is someone by it (though who that is does not get answered but feels important as the photography is very purposefully chosen, or so it feels like).

in the store

Elsewhere Rose (Lindy Jones) is getting ready to work in the plumbing supply store. Her boss, Pablo (Pablo Santiago) – by process of elimination from the cast list and apologies if I got that wrong – reads a news story about a dismembered body being found out in the desert. As we get to know her, we realise that she cares for an older man, her father we assume, and has a love of film – we see her reading Maya Deren’s Film & Philosophy, which offers a view, I think, into what Israel Perez is looking to do with the film

Wendy Zhuo as Anais

We also see Anais showering, with blood swirling round the plug hole, and searching through a wallet. Rose becomes aware of her when she sees her with Pablo – Anais has rented some back rooms off him. Rose snoops into the rooms, not finding the small fridge that we have seen Anais put some jars of, what looks like, blood into. They eventually meet when Rose spots Anais broken down on the highway and offers her a lift home. Anais invites her in to watch her films, which Rose enjoys and Anais says are about capturing time.

a threshold

Pablo has given Steve (Kent Hatch) a tin box (we never see what’s in it) and a gun. Steve is expressly told to leave them alone after commenting that *she* “is cute” and “has not changed a bit”, indicating that Anais is out of time. Rose clearly works out what she is, and we also get the concept of the threshold – a place where reality thins and that Anais calls home. It brought to mind Jean Rollin, and especially the threshold within the Nude Vampire, represented by a stage, which led to the “vampires’” dimension. Thresholds are, of course, an important trope in the genre.

bloodied

But what to say – expect no easy answers, or answers at all. This is a meditation on film, time and its mutability. It is a film, I believe, which will become used within some academic writing, especially where film study, form and thresholds are explored. It is a film that works outside traditional narrative and is carried by skilful photography and nuance. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.