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Writer/director Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void) serves up the tale of Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American man in Paris whose life is turned upside down and inside out after he has sex with two different women, decides he loves only one of them, but carelessly impregnates the other. Love features several graphic depictions of sex — engorged appendages, bodily fluids blasting toward the camera (in 3D!), and everything. That part of the movie I can actually appreciate and applaud. I’m all for demystifying sex while simultaneously finding the intrinsic beauty of it. I also appreciate Noé’s preference to let scenes play out in one, long take. Glusman shows commendable range in his performance and the photography is often very beautiful, even though Noé loves to concentrate on strobe lights and laser beams that almost send me into seizures from time to time. I guess you could say his overall style is a form of pretty that hurts to look at?

Unfortunately, Noé makes us pay for the privilege of watching all that pretty sex by wrapping it in Murphy’s dreadfully depressing and agonizingly never-ending inner conflict. You see, the pregnant woman doesn’t believe in abortion, so that baby’s definitely getting born. And he can either take care of that baby and his baby mama, or he can try to win back the affection of his true love, a fairly unhinged psycho named Electra. What’s a guy to do?

Watching Love reminded me of why I hate so many John Cusack movies — because I hate watching characters suffer under self-induced crises. This Murphy character sews the seeds of his own misfortune, and then agonizes over it for the course of the movie’s runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes. And he takes the audience with him, all the way through and beyond a scene where he holds his toddler in his arms and sobs all over it, apologizing for never loving its mother. Yes, we get to see a grown man and a toddler, both crying uncontrollably over Man’s inability to keep his dick in his pants. Love is a little preachy that way. I suppose it was Noé’s point to punish me about going to see a movie marketed as raw sex, only to berate me for all the trouble my penis could potentially get me into.

The moral of the story is apparently ‘don’t have sex with more than one woman.’ Which is easy for me, because I’m a gay man. And Gaspar Noé’s Love made me all the happier that I am.

I mean, look at this sad shit.