A BAD ROMANCE | Omeleto Comedy

A woman dates a scumbag.


Maggie is a hopeless, slightly ditzy romantic who has been on a date with Melvin. Melvin is nice and agreeable, but he's oddly non-committal and elusive. But he seems amenable when Maggie walks him home.

But when he invites her inside, their date takes an unpredictable turn, one that will challenge Maggie to drop her illusions and face reality.

Directed and written by Bex Bradshaw, this short dark comedy has the trappings of a rom-com on the surface, with its daffy but intrepid heroine, her romantic hopes, a date with the suggestion of true love. But it takes those elements and remixes them with more sinister, tense and foreboding ones, making for a film that interrogates the idea of romance itself with dark humor, suspense and surprising intensity.

Shot with an unexpectedly dark, moody visual eye, the film is bookended by scenes of a distraught Maggie in a car, having a breakdown. Maggie is a mess, her cutesy, girly outfit disheveled and her makeup smeared from her crying, even as she gets out of the car. After we hear gunshots, we backtrack to earlier in the evening, as Maggie is getting ready for her date. Reciting affirmations to herself in the mirror as she puts on her makeup, we see how hopeful Maggie is, but also perhaps just a little too expectant. Not only do we get a glimpse of Maggie's character and her driving desire, but considering the earlier scene, the emerging narrative structure suggests that her romantic hopes will be sorely disappointed in a dastardly way.

As a potential couple, Maggie is desperately eager to please, but Melvin is merely polite. Though he's not rude, he doesn't offer much of himself, which makes Maggie put in more effort. As an audience, we're not entirely hopeful, even when Melvin escorts Maggie inside the house. But inside, they discover a few unwanted visitors, and Maggie learns the dark truth about her suitor, veering the film into something akin to a crime drama or even film noir.

It's a fascinating transition, but aided with aplomb by performances that find the line between comedy and darkness, particularly from actor Katie Hall as Maggie. It's not a stretch to see Maggie as a Jennifer Coolidge type of character: a woman clinging to her illusions and reacting hilariously poorly as they fall apart right before her eyes. Maggie has her most truthful emotional moment with one of her unwanted "visitors," a dangerous, violent type named Kei, played with flair, menace and a soupcon of emotional intelligence by actor L.A. Williams. Though he's dangerous, he somehow pierces through Maggie's helplessness, getting her to see the truth about her date and pushing her to the edge until she reaches a breaking point.

The final movement of A BAD ROMANCE finds Maggie grappling with the cold hard reality of her dating life and her desperate willingness to appease and package herself for someone unworthy. Many romantic comedies focus on a central message of self-love and self-worth as a prerequisite for finding love, but Maggie's story takes that insight and spins it into a fresh, fascinatingly dark direction. Its ending is comically dark, but also ironic, hopeful and determined -- and viewers will suspect that Maggie's willingness to humor a bad date will be much less going forward.


A BAD ROMANCE. Courtesy of Bex Bradshaw at https://abadromance.com.