Look Both Ways (2022)

Look Both Ways arrives from Netflix with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing for it. Wanuri Kahiu directs, April Prosser writes, and Lili Reinhart plays Natalie, a University of Texas graduate whose pregnancy test splits her life into two parallel narratives. In one she raises a daughter in her hometown and claws toward a career in animation. In the other she moves to Los Angeles, assists a demanding animator played by Nia Long, and falls for a colleague. The conceit is tidy. The execution is breezy. Everyone is pleasant, and the film asks very little of anyone.

The progressive content here is present but muted. A Black woman directs, and the cast includes Aisha Dee, Nia Long, and Danny Ramirez without any of them functioning as a statement. Cara, the best friend, has a girlfriend in the Los Angeles timeline, a detail dropped into the frame and never discussed again. The story belongs to a woman weighing ambition against motherhood, a familiar tension handled with a soft hand. No character remarks on race. Nobody mentions the environment. Wealth and class never enter the conversation, and the film shows no interest in bodies, brains, or the historical record.

Its most striking quality is a refusal to lecture. The lessons about fate and risk arrive through montage, not monologue, and the sermonizing stays off-screen. Instead, we get a competent, gentle romance that treats its audience as adults who have sat through a romcom before. The needle barely moves. For those of us who catalog these things for a living, Look Both Ways registers as a mild case, agreeable and forgettable, the cinematic equivalent of a lukewarm seltzer.