15/05/2026
MOVIE REFLECTION: THE LOVED ONE
I’ve rewatched The Loved One, written and directed by Irene Villamor, and what initially appeared to be a simple dissection of a ten-year relationship slowly revealed itself as something more unsettling: a study of how love can distort people into roles they are expected to perform. Beneath its romance, the film quietly interrogates emotional labor, social class, and the dangerous tendency to romanticize suffering in relationships.
At the center of the film are Ellie and Eric, two people shaped by vastly different circumstances. Ellie is portrayed as someone who grew up with comfort and opportunities, yet remains emotionally adrift, uncertain of herself and her direction. Eric, meanwhile, embodies the eldest child burdened with responsibility, someone who gives endlessly to his family until sacrifice becomes inseparable from his identity. Through Eric’s perspective, the audience is initially led to believe that love is measured by endurance — that the one who waits longer, suffers more, and gives more must naturally be the one who loves more deeply.
The earlier parts of the film reinforce this idea carefully. Eric remembers Ellie with tenderness, almost reverence. She is framed through fragments of affection and longing, reduced into an image shaped by his memory and desire. Even in ordinary moments, such as Ellie wearing his hoodie, she becomes less of a person and more of a symbol of comfort, loss, and possession. From the very beginning, Ellie is narrated not as someone fully knowable, but as someone to be acquired and held onto.
This is perhaps where the film becomes most interesting.
In several interviews and podcasts, Villamor mentioned that the film was inspired by Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, a text that examines how lovers obsessively interpret every silence, every text message, and every gesture within a relationship. Through this lens, The Loved One becomes less about discovering who was right or wrong, and more about exposing the delusions people create when they are in love. Love in the film is not stable or rational; it is anxious, obsessive, and deeply performative.
This explains why audiences became divided between Team Eric and Team Ellie. The film encourages viewers to project their own experiences onto the relationship. What if Ellie had been the eldest child burdened by responsibility? What if Eric had been financially secure? How much of their conflict was truly about personality, and how much of it was shaped by class, gender expectations, and emotional exhaustion?
The film subtly critiques how women are often expected to endure silently within relationships. Ellie is constantly perceived through Eric’s emotional framework rather than through her own voice. Much like Eric’s mother, who quietly accepts the life handed to her, or Nicole, who settles into the role of understanding companion, the women in the film are repeatedly positioned as people who absorb disappointment rather than confront it. Ellie’s silence becomes mistaken for passivity, when in reality it is emotional suppression.
What makes the narrative effective is that it eventually destabilizes Eric’s perspective. As the story unfolds, Ellie is no longer merely the person being remembered — she becomes someone who is also waiting, grieving, and longing. The restaurant scene especially dismantles the earlier assumption that only Eric carried the weight of love. Both of them were lovers in different ways, both trapped in their own narratives of sacrifice and desire.
And this is where the film’s most painful realization emerges: silence is never neutral.
Silence allows decay to begin quietly. Ellie avoids expressing herself until the relationship has already begun collapsing from within. Eric, meanwhile, mistakes endurance for emotional honesty, believing that loving more means suffering more. Neither fully communicates what they need, and so both become consumed by assumptions about each other.
In the end, The Loved One is not really asking audiences to choose between Team Eric or Team Ellie. Instead, it asks a more uncomfortable question: how often do people confuse longing, waiting, and suffering for love itself? The tragedy of the film lies in how both characters reduce themselves in the relationship — Ellie into an object of desire, Eric into a martyr of devotion — until neither truly sees the other anymore.
