Soulmate(s)

Soulmates is about Jessamine, a born and raised Vermonter. On the cusp of her thirties, she gets engaged to a Connecticut business executive of a new maple syrup factory. Her neurotic lifetime BFF and roommate Sam despises the new factory for taking business away from local farmers. She gatekeeps both Vermont and her best friend from these “out-of-staters.” Jess’s fiance Landon becomes the source of Sam’s anger because the more time Jess spends with him, the less she cares about protesting the factory, and the more she drinks cappuccinos and eats caviar. The film was inconsistently paced with time skips, which really hurts Jess and Sam’s development. You don’t get a sense of who Jess is or why she likes Landon because the two months they date before getting engaged occur in a montage. The lack of development unintentionally validates Sam’s obsession. Her neurosis comes off as immature, but every character in this film acts childishly at one point or another. Sam is an aspiring writer whose career has hit a plateau as she also approaches her thirties. With nothing going on in her life, her obsession over Jess’s love life takes priority. If you see the poster, two ladies holding hands behind a man’s back, and get ****, no one could blame you. Multiple people mistake Sam as a lesbian, she adamantly refuses to let Jess get married, she shows no interest in men, and all-around Sam treats Jess as a wife rather than a best friend. The choice to pair every female and male character together at the end puts the heteronormative messaging in plain view.