Genre Comedy

Idiot Love (2004)

Item: Idiot Love
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Idiot Love (2004)

Right, let me get the positives out of the way quickly, because there are some, and it wouldn't be fair to pretend otherwise. The acting is solid. The soundtrack genuinely surprised me, in a good way. And Andorra, as a setting, is beautiful on screen. There's a visual warmth here, a charm to the way the country looks, and the chemistry between the leads isn't without its appeal. Pacing-wise, it moves along well enough. On a purely technical level, this is a competent little film.

So why does it sit at one and a half stars? Because there's an enormous, deeply uncomfortable problem sitting right in the middle of it, and the film doesn't just ignore that problem. It celebrates it.

The central romance, the thing this film is built around and wants you to root for, is stalking. I'm not being dramatic or uncharitable. The male lead follows this woman. He shows up uninvited, repeatedly. He inserts himself into her life again and again, refusing to take no for an answer, wearing her down through sheer persistence and refusal to respect her boundaries. And the film's response to all of this? To reward him. She leaves her husband. She chooses him. True love wins.

No. That's not how this works. What's being described there, stripped of the soft-focus cinematography and the nice soundtrack, is grooming. It's boundary violation. It's the kind of behaviour that, in real life, ends with someone filing a restraining order, not riding off into the sunset together. And I think that matters. I really do.

Now, I want to be clear: I'm not asking every film to have moral heroes as its leads. Morally grey characters, complicated relationships, messy love stories, all of that is fair game, and some of the most interesting films ever made are built around deeply flawed people doing questionable things. But there's a crucial difference between portraying that behaviour and endorsing it. This film endorses it, wholeheartedly, without a flicker of self-awareness. It frames manipulation and obsession as romantic persistence, and then hands the guy his prize at the end. That's not complexity. That's just bad values dressed up in a rom-com filter.

I picked this up as part of my A-Z World Tour Challenge, working through films by country, and Andorra isn't exactly overloaded with cinematic options. I came in genuinely hoping to be pleasantly surprised, the way I was with Megdan: Between Water and Fire (2024), a film from another small nation that managed to do something genuinely interesting with limited resources. This one had the resources, in terms of craft at least, but squandered them on a story that left me increasingly uneasy the further it went.

There's a version of this film that could have worked. Take the same setting, the same actors, even the same basic situation, but allow the story to interrogate what's actually happening rather than romanticise it. Give the woman some genuine agency. Let the consequences feel real. Instead, it takes the easy, lazy, troubling route: the man gets what he wants because he wanted it badly enough, and we're meant to find that swoon-worthy.

I didn't swoon. I squirmed.

One and a half stars, and the half is entirely down to the scenery and the soundtrack, because they genuinely do deserve a mention. Everything else here can stay in Andorra.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2025-05-22

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Disney Plus · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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