Love Crime (2022)

I got wind of this film through an email from Shane Ryan-Reid's Mad Scinema Productions back in July, and I was excited to check it out. Unfortunately a few things came up and I was delayed by a couple months, but we're here now, making this happen for our September indie post.

Love Crime stars Nicole D'Angelo (who also directed) as Jodi, based somewhat on Jodi Arias, who believes God sent her Travis (Ryan-Reid), a guy who does self-help seminars. She thinks he's perfect for her, but Travis sees her as a nice girl who's great to spend time with and hook up with. As things get more serious on Jodi's side, Travis finds he can't get out as easily as he thinks, and things only get worse for him as Jodi's mental condition worsens. When she ultimately snaps and kills Travis, she discovers the criminal justice system isn't as easy to persuade as Travis was.

This is packaged like a true crime film, and what I was expecting was Cinema Epoch meets true crime, which sounded like a lot of fun, but what I got was something much more. D'Angelo and Cinema Epoch take the true crime film and turn it on its ear. This isn't a Lifetime movie of the week, "The Long Island Lolita" with D'Angelo as the Alyssa Milano or Tori Spelling femme fatale. And Ryan-Reid isn't your run of the mill Bryan Austen Green boy next door who falls victim to said femme fatale. Beyond the storytelling style, which works in a nonlinear way to tell us the ending first, but make the suspense the "how do we get there?", we have a dynamic between D'Angelo and Ryan-Reid that takes the black and white we usually see in true crime dramas, and melds it into a bunch of gray. D'Angelo's Jodi isn't totally unsympathetic, and Ryan-Reid's Travis is boy next door in the realer sense in that he's not always that nice. It's not so much a metacriticism of the true crime genre, as it's exploiting it, the way true crime films often exploit the victims involved, and I appreciated that approach.

How D'Angelo plays Jodi is a huge factor in why this worked for me. The way she'd have Jodi's voice change ever so slightly when she thinks she's losing Travis in order to get him to come back to her, making herself sound a little more vulnerable when she needs to be, or a little more seductive when she needs to be. How D'Angelo does it though, it's not that Jodi's manipulative, it's a defense mechanism she's developed over time as a way to manage in her world, and we see her using it in court or in prison, expecting the same effect as she gets with Travis, but the criminal justice system can't be manipulated like that. One of my favorite scenes was when Jodi's reading her bible, and she hears a knock at the door, and says "thank you," meaning she's thanking God for sending Travis over. It wasn't a dramatic "thank you," it was more a thanking a friend for doing you a favor, showing the relationship Jodi thinks she has with God. Again, usually the true crime femme fatale is unhinged in a black and white villain kind of way, and I liked how D'Angelo subverted that in the way she depicted Jodi.

That bleeds perfectly (no pun intended) in with how Ryan-Reid plays Travis. He's not a total bro, but there's enough bro there to make it work, enough of him thinking he's the man that he thinks he has everything under control. When Jodi's voice changes that little bit after Travis starts to put some distance between them, and he decides "why not, let's hook up again?", he thinks he's consciously making that decision. By the same token, Ryan-Reid never plays Travis so bad that he deserves his fate, which is also really important. The thing I always like about seeing him in these Cinema Epoch productions is the sense of danger he adds to movies that already feel dangerous in the style they're made, but here he exudes that danger in a different way, the manic energy is more under the surface and drawing Jodi in, like her character is feeding off it so we hit this inevitable conclusion. Again, not enough to make us feel like Jodi was justified in killing him, but enough for us to get why it all happens.

Lisa London is another Cinema Epoch mainstay who appears in this, and while she has a very small part, for me it really tied together this subversion of the true crime genre, as she's the closest thing to a character in one of those films. My parents watch a lot of those true crime shows on ID or whatever, and while I have trouble with something like that that often depicts grizzly murders, when I'm up in New England visiting them, I find I have to listen to them while I'm in the living room getting a coffee refill or making myself a sandwich, and Lisa London is that detective in those shows who solves everything, and brings the baddie to justice. We trust her on that kind of show when she tells us that they found who the killer was because his car had the same tire tracks as the tire tracks near the swamp where they found the victim's body, and while we have no idea if that science is sound, there is no Marisa Tomei winning an Oscar to tell us those couldn't be the tire tracks despite what the state's expert on the stand says, so we have to trust the detective that they have their man and he's going to fry. She has no sympathy for Jodi, in her world Jodi is played by Tori Spelling in the movie of the week, and London's is played by Vivica A. Fox in that same film, no nonsense, boots up on the table, telling her detective friend she likes her coffee bitter like the truth, and making sure he isn't falling for Jodi's charms when she thinks he might be cracking. We needed London's character as the thread to tie this movie to the genre it's trying to subvert.

Back in 2014 or '15, my wife Jen and I watched a Netflix documentary on the Pamela Smart story. It was both a look back on that case, and a commentary on the true crime sensationalism that happens with cases like these, and how in that rush to exploit and sensationalize, we never truly get the whole story. That one was big for me, because I grew up near where it happened, and at the time, we all took for granted that Smart convinced her high school student boyfriend and his friends to murder her husband, and the documentary we watched shoots a lot of holes in that theory we all took for granted. I told my mom about it, and while she yes'd me for a few minutes, when I was done, as if she didn't hear a thing I'd said, responded with "it was horrible how she manipulated those kids to kill her husband like that." In that sense, I may have been particularly sensitive to what D'Angelo and co. were going for here--we even had the Lisa London cop, the detective who arrested Pamela Smart was so proud of himself in that documentary when told the filmmakers how he told her "I have good news and bad news, the good news is we found your husband's killer, that bad news is, it's you." It makes "if truth is bitter, my coffee should be" sound circumspect by comparison.

And with that, let's wrap this up. In the US you can get this on Tubi and Plex, so perhaps outside the US it's available too. If you're a fan of true crime, this may not be for you, despite the fact that it's packaged like a true crime drama. If you're looking for something different from that though, at just over an hour and available free on streaming, this is worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15410936

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!