Malcolm and Marie review, with no witty title.

What do you call an emotional roller coaster if it’s more of an ‘emotional electric chair that fries you at 500 volts out of nowhere, then keeps you at a steady but uncomfortable tingling until the next shock, repeating this process for 2 hours until it just sort of… ends, but with some soul music, admittedly astonishing acting, picturesque framing and all the other hallmarks of a beautiful film’? Sorry, no punchline.

If that paragraph lost your attention along the way, or you had to begrudgingly re-read it once you realised it hadn’t stuck the first-time round, then you just received a glimpse of the mountain it feels like you’re climbing when watching Malcolm and Marie. Sam Levinson’s latest foray into feature filmmaking locks us in as we witness the delicate un-weaving of the masks they both wear, and the downward spiral of their relationship over the course of a post-party all-you-can-scream buffet.

Except the masks aren’t delicately unwoven, but torn off in spite, and it’s not a downward spiral but a lightning bolt. You can try to imagine a dressing room briefing, where John David Washington and Zendaya are told they have 2 hours to argue and reconcile in as spectacular, melodramatic and repeating fashion as they can muster. The film starts with its best scene, following Washington’s Malcolm parading round the set, self-proclaiming and self-obsessing, while Zendaya’s Marie silently smokes to stage left, as the realisation dawns that these two are a country mile from being on the same page. This is, unfortunately, the first and last point at which the film hits its stride, convincing you that you are about to witness much more of a refreshingly sensitive and innovative romantic drama, than you in fact are.

What follows is, as warned above, a relentless loop of grit and cruelty, that leaves you taking neither side and, personally, just wanting it to end. The 30-minute spells of peace between the lovers are made insufferable by the fact that, with minimal empathy for either character due to the couple’s one-upmanship, narcissism and knife twisting, their happiness feels uninteresting. While you understand the sadness and the guilt that have boiled over into the Sisyphean cycle of argument and reconciliation that forms the backbone of Malcolm and Marie’s plot, the manner in which the tension plays out between the two is, in a word, exhausting. If you were to call the film eye-opening, it would refer more to the undeniably excellent performances by both leads, which keep your eyes glued to the film, against the best wishes of an inner voice telling you that you could save yourself some dopamine and, in fact, just turn it off.

Perhaps that’s the point, to back the viewer into a corner and make them writhe over the emotional abuse, gaslighting and remorseless mental games, until they arrive at some poignant realisation about a past relationship or aspect of themselves that might not be as flawless as they thought. If that is the goalpost, then Malcolm and Marie still misses by quite a margin. To try and portray a grounded, raw and open-hearted conflict of love and hate with such convoluted, aloof ‘big-brain’ dialogue in such a formulaic back and forth, leaves you yearning for what the film could have been, and with distant memories your less drained self of two hours prior.

You may think all this has glossed over the positives of the film, the performances, mise en scène and music, which are all genuinely superb. Every ingredient but one is Michelin star, but when that one ingredient is the writing, you end up with an angry 01:00 AM bowl of Kraft mac and cheese.