Newness: A How-To Guide For Having A Terrible Open Relationship
Netflix offers up a morality play on the dangers of non-monogamy
“Great,” I thought to myself the other day when I first learned of a new Netflix movie about an open relationship. “Here’s finally a story about people like me.” But it turns out the only thing worse than very rarely seeing the kind of life you live depicted in a movie is to see it grossly misunderstood and judged. Newness turned out to be nothing more than a morality play warning people of how vapid and doomed to failure open relationships are, and presenting the relative boredom (as they depicted it) of monogamy to be worth the price of love.
Newness, which started out very promisingly is about Martin, a divorced pharmacist who is still hung up on his ex-wife and Gabriella (Gabi), a physical therapy assistant who admits to getting bored easily with anything that isn’t new. They get together one night through a dating app that allows users to indicate whether they are looking for a relationship or just a hook-up. Both of them had planned for a one-time thing, but ended up enjoying each other so much compared to the other people they’d been meeting that they decided to keep seeing each other.
So far, so good. The lovers are charming together and you’re really rooting for them by…
