“What if?” is a reliably magnetic question. What if you got rejected instead of accepted, took one job over another, cut and run on a lover or stuck it out? The non-Marvel multiverse potential is the evergreen hook of Idina Menzel’s Broadway vehicle If/Then, the NBC series Ordinary Joe, and Netflix’s new film Look Both Ways, in which Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart plays a recent college graduate whose unexpected pregnancy splinters her life into two distinct trajectories. Think a zillennial, streaming-era version of Sliding Doors, the 1998 film in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays a Londoner whose life diverges over making/missing a train and, like Look Both Ways, differentiates its timelines with a haircut.
Look Both Ways, directed by Rafiki’s Wanuri Kahiu from a script by April Prosser, also plays out on dual timelines, but sands down the edges – its affect is warm and reassuring, its methods for affirming that everything’s gonna be all right are cozy and tame, especially in regards to young motherhood. Notably, the variable that precipitates the timeline split is not whether Reinhart’s Natalie Bennett decides to keep a surprise pregnancy by her friend turned one-night stand Gabe (Danny Ramirez) on the eve of graduation from the University of Texas in Austin. That choice, which cannot help but invoke the hellscape that is reproductive health in the US during the long dismantling of Roe v Wade, especially in Texas, stems out of one timeline and is quickly glossed over.
