You Can Live Forever 2022 Movie Review

『The Boundaries Between Innocent First Love and Faith』

🎥 Movie Overview

🎬 Title: You Can Live Forever (2022)
🌍 Country: 🇨🇦 Canada
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Romance / Queer
⏳ Runtime: 93 min
📢 Directors & Screenwriters: Sarah Watts, Mark Slutsky

👩‍💼 Cast: Anwen O'Driscoll – Jaime
June Laporte – Marike

🧩 Deep Story Exploration (Spoilers)

👧 An Eternal Promise Blossoming in a Closed World

You Can Live Forever is set in the deeply closed world of a Jehovah’s Witness community in Quebec, Canada during the 1990s, portraying the intense yet heartbreaking first love between Jaime, an outsider, and Marike, a devout believer.

🌿 The Irony of the Promise to "Live Forever"

The film’s title comes from a Jehovah’s Witnesses doctrinal book, referring to the promise that faithful believers will live forever in a ‘paradise on earth’ after Armageddon. This promise of “eternity” is what grounds Marike’s faith, but at the same time, it becomes the biggest threat to her love with Jaime in the present world.

• For Marike: She knows her sexual orientation conflicts with her faith’s doctrine, but she endures reality by believing that in paradise, she and Jaime will be together. Her line, “I can believe enough for the both of us,” encapsulates her cognitive dissonance and sacrificial love as she tries to reconcile faith with forbidden desire.
• For Jaime: Having lost her father and estranged from faith, “eternity” means nothing to her—it’s about the here and now with Marike. She urges Marike to leave the church and live in reality with her. Their relationship becomes a collision between apocalyptic promises and the fleeting present.

🌸 A Secluded Community and the Fever of First Love

The film does not portray the community members as villains, but as people sincerely trapped in their own faith. This makes Jaime and Marike’s secret encounters even more intense. The furtive glances at church meetings, the hidden touches, even the embrace in the bathroom symbolize how the two are suffering from a forbidden fever in a confined space. A particularly symbolic scene is the mock-baptism where Marike’s act of devotion collides with erotic desire, visually embodying the clash between faith and flesh.

🧩 The Realist and the Idealist

Jaime: The Outsider’s Eyes, Voice of Reality

After her father’s death and her mother’s depression, Jaime comes to live with her aunt. She is both an observer and a skeptic of the community. Open and relatively comfortable with her sexuality, she offers Marike a realistic choice of escape. Through Jaime’s eyes, the audience perceives the injustice of religious pressure and critiques the closed world.

Marike: The Confined Believer, The Conflicted Lover

Marike, the daughter of a community leader, is a devout believer. She fears becoming one of the “worldly people” outside the church and has internalized the cruelty of the rule that forces her to treat her shunned mother as “dead.” Torn between her powerful attraction to Jaime and lifelong devotion to her community, she ultimately chooses engagement and tells Jaime, “In paradise, we’ll be okay.” This moment tragically reveals Marike’s purity and willingness to sacrifice reality for the promise of eternal love.

🦋 Emotional Resonance and Thematic Significance

✨ Bitter Reality

Years later, Jaime, now a college student, visits her aunt again and is met at the station by Marike. Marike now has a child with her husband named Luca—a name hinting at the Tower of Lucca in Italy, a place Jaime once dreamed of visiting. This subtle reference shows Marike has secretly preserved her love and memories with Jaime in hidden form.

🕊️ The Meaning of “Don’t Go”

The most significant moment comes at the end. As Jaime tries to leave the car, Marike stops her. When Jaime asks, “Are you going to stop me?” Marike silently shakes her head. This silence and gesture carry layered meanings:

• Affirmation of Love: Marike still loves Jaime, showing that her feelings have not been erased by religion or marriage.
• Reflection of Eternal Loss: Jaime’s tears reveal the devastating truth that their pure first love can never be reclaimed. Marike cannot choose Jaime in reality, but she wanted their love to “live forever” in her heart.

You Can Live Forever avoids the cliché of queer cinema tragedy, but painfully illustrates how the vast institution of religion can distort personal happiness and leave an everlasting scar on true love.

🎯 Personal Rating

💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★★