Mark Reviews Movies: ONLY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

In terms of the straightforward chronology of writer/director Takashi Doscher's story, Only begins with the narrative's third act. Through flashbacks, the filmmaker reveals the first and second acts of this story. It's about a virus, spread by ash falling from the sky due to a passing comet, that affects only the female members of every species on Earth.

We learn that fact during the flashbacks, but the bulk of the story is about how Eva (Freida Pinto) and Will (Leslie Odom Jr.), who are dating when the pandemic begins, respond to outbreak. By beginning relatively near the end of this story, we're basically watching Eva's inevitable march toward death.

Knowing that she has become infected, she wants to travel to a waterfall, where she and Will had previously taken a trip. There are complications, of course. There's a government bounty on any surviving women, who might hold the key, not to a cure, but to continuing humanity in the ultimate absence of their gender.

Doscher does give us a sliver of hope, if only because there must be some answer within the flashbacks—information about the virus, what it does to its victims, and how Eva was infected. To his credit, the filmmaker is more interested in observing how the central relationship is molded and finds its final shape within a world on the brink of devastation.

Too much gets in the way of that goal, though. In the present-day scenes, the relationship takes a back seat to the characters being pursued by those on the hunt for women. In the flashbacks, after some brief pre-outbreak happiness, we witness how Will becomes obsessed with protecting Eva, locking her away in his self-made quarantine of her apartment.

It is fascinating how these flashbacks re-frame our assumptions about this relationship, as well as how the power dynamic shifts from the past to the present. Both Pinto, as a woman falling into despair and then rising to acceptance, and Odom, as a man whose feelings become more defined by desperation than love, are quite good at communicating that shift.

Ultimately, Only is about Eva trying to regain some autonomy over her life and her body in the face of overwhelming control. We theoretically sympathize with that, but given the circumstances, presented with such a general sense of doom here, it's much more difficult to understand it.

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