Adore is less about love and more about selfishness. It asks whether a lifelong friendship can survive when both parties decide to burn the rulebook of motherhood together. The answer the film gives is haunting, but getting there requires a hefty suspension of disbelief.

Rating: ⭐⭐½ (2.5/5)

Adore is a beautiful, frustrating, and utterly strange film. It is too melodramatic to be a serious art-house hit, yet too slow and contemplative to be a trashy thriller. For viewers willing to suspend modern ethical lens and embrace the film as a fable about obsessive love, there is a hypnotic, tragic quality to it. You will likely find yourself shouting at the screen, but you probably won’t look away.

The relationships begin when the boys are 15 (though the actors are clearly adults, which softens the ick factor). The narrative glosses over the inherent power imbalance and potential for psychological damage with surprising speed. Instead of a gritty exploration of abuse or manipulation, Adore presents the affairs as almost natural—a kind of logical, beautiful extension of the friends’ intense bond. The lack of societal judgment (the small town seems oddly oblivious) robs the story of tension it desperately needs.

The young male leads (Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville as the sons, plus Nicholas Hope as a family friend) are adequate, though they are often reduced to objects of desire rather than fully realized characters. The film is less about the boys’ coming-of-age and more about the women’s unravelling.

You are uncomfortable with age-gap dynamics, large power imbalances, or films that prioritize mood over plot logic.