FYI: this isn’t your conventional romantic comedy chick flick, where the amazingly good-looking knight in shining armor comes to your rescue with corny ‘I love you’ speeches and you live happily ever after. Like Crazy is just a creepy 90-minute documentary on a fading long-distance relationship. Been there, done that, please don’t record it behind my back and shove it in my face the next year. How was Sundance raving about this? I swear I’m not a nutcase, but I bet you I have a tape just like this shoved in a shoebox hidden under my bed. Do I get an award for living a normal, modern-day life?

Director Drake Doremus thought it would be amusing to film a movie without a script, on an LA-based furniture designer Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and a British writer Anna (Felicity Jones) who fall in love during their senior year in college. It all starts off with a love letter, and suddenly they’re inseparable. It’s sickening, it’s suffocating, it’s seriously delirious, this love they have for each other. You know the feeling. The intense passion you get when you experience love for the first time and you just can’t let go of it, you must have it. And so you accept the consequences — Anna stays past the expiry date of her student visa just to spend a summer with Jacob and now she’s stuck in London for good.

I don’t believe that Anna and Jacob are in love. I believe they’re very well acquainted with the love that they are acting out, one where they’re way too comfortable in each other’s skin they might as well turn into one single being. It’s so great when we’re together, but then it all falls apart when we’re apart. Sound familiar? It starts to get uncannily relatable when Jacob gets involved with Sam (Jennifer Lawrence) and Anna with Simon (Charlie Bewley). Of course Sam and Simon are just wheelers in this love-square and you can really feel their pain in all the time they’re wasting — the only good scene in the film is one extremely embarrassing marriage proposal.

The trailer was a hoax! There’s no love story here. It’s a relationship built on over-inflated hormones, insecure egos and an unnerving stubbornness we all have too much experience with. After the break-ups and make-ups you’re literally exhausted watching these two poor souls pick up the pieces that all you want to do is shake them and pray they could just escape each others’ grasps. This will not draw tears of love, forgiveness, or any other heart-felt emotions. You will only feel pity. And who wants to feel that, especially during a movie?

I’ve never connected with a movie so much to the point where I lost connection. We don’t go to the movies to watch another couple suffer in the same way we have in our own lives. This isn’t an episode of The Twilight Zone. We’re trying to escape our mundane, typical lives and experience some razzle-dazzle with beautiful people, fancy cars and expensive lights. Stop changing things up in modern cinema and give me my Cinderella story.

[star v=25]