Marina Malysh’s By Love (2024) is a film about change—not the gradual kind, but the kind that happens in an instant, deep within. It follows a terminally ill man, ready to stop treatment, as he informs his father in a near-empty diner and later tells his doctor. These moments feel like the only solid ground in a film that quickly drifts into the abstract. As the protagonist slips into a surreal landscape, it becomes clear that this story is less about physical illness and more about something harder to diagnose: a spiritual reckoning.
Malysh isn’t particularly subtle in her approach. As she explores themes of life, death, familial relationships, childhood trauma, and religion, she brings out the big guns – a kind of Garden of Eden, where the protagonist finds himself under an apple tree, conversing with different manifestations of God. She wastes no time, opening the film with the protagonist’s early memories of his father, an abusive alcoholic, before delving into his illness. In true Catholic fashion, the protagonist must forgive – in this case, his father. He must shed the resentment that has hardened like “bark around his heart”.
It is possible to see this film as though it takes place entirely in the protagonist’s mind, in a single moment of weighing his options. There is a slow shift happening in his mind – he is transitioning from resentment to forgiveness, from nihilism to hope. This transformation unfolds in distinct stages. First, he recalls his childhood trauma. Then, he meets his father in the diner, visits the doctor, and enters a surreal meadow where he speaks with a shapeshifting God who gradually softens him. Finally, he experiences flashes of memory (shot on film stock), which ultimately lead him to choose life and continue his treatment. Some of these transitions are quite obvious – such as the protagonist’s direct encounter with God or the film stock memories. Others are more subtle, occurring almost unintentionally.
Perhaps the most striking of these shifts takes place in an eerily Lynchian diner scene, where father and son discuss religion. The son refuses to accept his father’s transformation from an abusive man to a humbled man of God. We enter the diner from one side: the son sits on the left, looking right; the father sits on the right, looking left. The film briefly cuts away, and when we return, we follow a man washing his hands in the diner sink. As the camera pans up, we see the father and son’s conversation reflected in a mirror – but now, their positions are reversed. The father sits on the left, the son on the right. From this point onward, we observe them in this reversed composition, as though we’ve passed through a mirror into another world.
This subtle yet disorienting visual cue suggests we have already entered the protagonist’s mind – the conversation is no longer grounded in reality. Compared to the film’s more overt methods of depicting psychological change, this one is particularly effective because it operates on a subconscious level. If you blink and miss the transition, you still feel that something has shifted – that something is no longer quite as it was – but you may not immediately understand why.
This is one of the oldest tricks in ole film book. The 180-degree rule establishes an axis along which characters interact, and crossing it typically signifies a major shift. In By Love, this crossing happens gradually, guided by the mirror, but without an obvious motivation. It is this breaking of the rule that subtly signals a transformation in the protagonist’s mental state – he is slipping further into a dreamscape where truth will be revealed. But instead of God directly declaring that love is the answer, Malysh pokes into our subconscious, saying: something is happening.
Gazing upon the two men sitting across from each other, we are also reminded of Lacan’s mirror stage; the son can only perceive himself through the reflection of his father. Their tumultuous relationship from the past is something the protagonist simply cannot look past, and that is also what his father tells him in quite a curt way; the protagonist is to blame for his own illness. Instead of finding purpose in his own life, instead of looking at it through his own eyes (which the shots on film at the end of the film stand in for), he projects all his emotional turmoil on the image of his dad, but the frustrating fact of the matter is: his dad has changed. Irreversibly, he has become a good man, and that’s what he tells the protagonist; he has changed, and now it is up to the protagonist to accept his change and move on – or stick with the resentment and, well, die.
The passing through the mirror, besides adding to the strange, dreamlike feeling of the whole film, subtly reorients our perception of father and son as reflections of each other. The father represents a possible future for the son, but only if he heeds his advice. Otherwise, the image on the other side of the table remains just that: an unreachable reflection of something he will never become.
This playfulness with different representations of the self is apparently dear to the director as it becomes truly apparent in the second part of the film. No person is completely sealed; the protagonist sees varying embodiments of himself, that other part, that is trying to convince him to seek treatment and continue his life. These figures morph constantly: an innocent child, a wise woman, and even – his own father. But this time, the reflection is different to the one we saw at the diner – it is an idealised version, the kind of father he wishes he had. The cold detachment of their earlier exchange, wrapped in the diner’s subdued, moody greens, gives way to a warmer, more compassionate presence, mirroring the vivid, saturated hues of the meadow.
The scene in the diner ends with the father getting up, patting his son on the shoulder and leaving. We then cross the line again – we observe the son from the street, framed inside an old-timey restaurant window. It is as though we have left the mirrored stage and have been thrust back into reality. The protagonist returns to real life for a while, until he transcends from the meeting with his doctor into another plane of existence, where he encounters God – or himself – in the meadow.
Upon seeing this film for the first time, we might not even notice this strange play with mirrors as there are so many symbols fighting for our attention – the apples, the God in all his forms. The film’s most profound moments are not in its grand gestures but in its quieter shifts, the little visual clues we are given in the diner scene. In a film striving for transcendence, it is in this fleeting, seemingly accidental moment that it almost achieves it.
