Regardless of the medium, debuts are distillations of a lifetime’s worth of ideas and experience. Without discipline, the results can be bloated and overwrought. First-time writer-director BT Meza demonstrates remarkable restraint in his debut feature, despite the literary allusions and scope of his ideas.
Like Ex Machina before it, Affection puts a science-fiction spin on the tale of Bluebeard. But rather than a succession of multiple wives, their murdered bodies hidden in a forbidden room, here it’s the same one, Ellie (Jessica Rothe).
We first see her wake wounded in the middle of the road, getting up only to suffer a prolonged and gruelling seizure before she’s struck by a car. Then she wakes again, confused in bed. Dissociating and suffering memory loss, neither her body nor identity match the sense of self she holds most to be true. Even her name, she says, is wrong. Yet here’s Bruce (Joseph Cross), her apparent husband, and Alice (Julianna Layne), her pre-teen daughter. Bruce tells her she’s recovering from a traumatic accident and they’re living in isolation while she rebuilds her fractured psyche. Ellie capitulates but never fully takes him at his word.
She’s afflicted with trembling hands and full-body seizures that grow worse the nearer she comes to discovering the truth of what’s happened to her — be that by the incongruent gaps in her memory or discovering a plastic-wrapped body that chases her through the woods. The reveal is best enjoyed firsthand but, suffice it to say, there’s body horror that brings to mind The Brood and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It also cements Bruce as much a Bluebeard as Doctor Frankenstein. Like Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, the film is a meditation on grief, with Meza revealing the inspiration lies in the childhood loss of his father and being forced to move to a rural area with his mother’s abusive boyfriend.
The quality of Cross’ performance ensures that, even at his most abusive and despicable, he still retains a shred of empathy. Layne, who’s been professionally acting since age four, is completely convincing as Alice, every emotional display almost too real to bear. But it’s Rothe who steals the show, performing multiple versions of Ellie in multiple states, one effectively a zombie. She’s understated and natural in moments of introspection, affecting in emotional states that never fall into melodrama, and fully inhabits the seizures, which conjure the dance and movement choreography of Ryan Heffington (especially from sci-fi show The OA and Sia’s music video for “Chandelier”).
The low angles, rural setting, and creeping horror sit seamlessly with the sci-fi elements, a fusion echoed in Daniel Berk’s score with its moments of proto air raid sirens and strings alongside disconcerting electronic drones. Underpinning all this is a writer-director who refuses to follow the streamers and Hollywood executives and explain everything away. Knowing why something exists or how it works in the world doesn’t equal acceptance. We all know the inevitability of losing loved ones, but that knowledge doesn’t make the burden any easier to bear. It’s how we act on and articulate the fallout from that loss that matters. Just ask Bruce.
DISTRIBUTOR
Blue Finch
DIRECTOR
BT Meza
SCREENPLAY
BT Meza
CAST
Jessica Rothe
Joseph Cross
Julianna Layne
DIGITAL
8 June 2026
