Now when you see the score you may be thinking that’s pretty harsh. This isn’t a horror film or anything like that so what gives here? Well, the main problem is this movie really brings out the worst in all of the characters as far as the romantic context is concerned. I’ll dive into this in a moment but you just can’t picture there being a happy ending for anyone.

The movie introduces us to a family that is in a rather toxic situation. The father is a drunk who is out of a job and has basically given up on ever doing anything productive with his life. His wife goes off cheating on him constantly in order to bring home some money so they can have some food. The grandmother basically hates happiness and so she has a personal vendetta against everybody. The youngest daughter is incredibly spoiled and rude to everybody. Finally you have the eldest daughter who serves as the main character, Ellie. She has never really seen any guys who interested her and she does her best to help support the family by finding clams and such to eat. Unfortunately one day she is hit on by a guy who works at the local deli and he steals a kiss. She is now unable to focus on anything else and decides to emotionally blackmail him into marrying her through a web of lies and a false suicide attempt. How can this romance go wrong?

It’s hard to know where to start with this one but it’s clear from the jump that this romance is a bad one. Lets dive more into how she ropes Ed in. Basically Ellie pretends that she has been kicked out of the house by her family and will have nowhere to go if Ed doesn’t marry her. Additionally she acts as though she is doing to drown herself if he doesn’t go with her. It puts him in an extremely difficult position and the worst part is of course she lies to him about the family in general. As far as he knows they are all upstanding citizens but the problem is that everyone else knows the family’s true personalities and status.

This is inevitably going to blow up and Ellie shouldn’t have led off the way that she did. Yeah she probably would not have gotten him to marry her but if you have to force that into action then it’s not a true romance. Meanwhile Ed also does a lot of bad stuff here. For starters he is way too aggressive when he first meets Ellie. Taking a kiss was completely out of bounds and the same goes for taking her clams which forced her to accept his offer of a drive. The fact that she is so cautious about getting into another man’s vehicle is a good thing but here he is trying to tell her that she shouldn’t be so stuffy.

Additionally he doesn’t handle any of the twists very well either. One of the first things he does upon learning that she was lying is “Revenge Cheating” by going to the club and having an affair. If a guy goes that extreme so quickly then there is really no going back from that. Prior to that maybe both characters could talk things out but you can’t take back cheating. Once it happens then it’s all over. He also went and scratched her name off of the boat he was building and humiliated her in front of the whole club. Again you can’t really take these things back.

It leads to another cycle of revenge as Ellie goes out with another man to make Ed jealous and it becomes a whole scene. Basically when you have drama in a romance it can be fairly serious but you should never do something that is impossible to come back from. This film was just too mean spirited the whole time so that their making up by the end is incredibly unrealistic. You won’t believe it and none of the characters should in the slightest.

I was also expecting some kind of a redemption arc for the father but it never happened. That was surprising but I guess it goes to show that the family just isn’t going to change in the slightest. If anything I dare say that Ellie shouldn’t have returned in the first place. By the end she is definitely obligated to help but before that it was a clean split and one that I don’t think she needed to try and fix. Her decision to head over to the house at all was baffling because with all of the lies in place, did she really think that Ed wouldn’t have found something out? These weren’t small lies, they were big ones.

The whole lie of the family kicking her out for example. That is bound to come up during dinner as Ed would make sure that it did. So the writing here was a bit awkward. In general the writing could also be a bit repetitive but in part that’s due to the way Ellie and Ed talk to each other. It’s like they have to repeat each other’s line as a statement each time and so they don’t make a lot of progress sometimes. The film’s story can still be interesting but I found that it went way too far every time. I’d argue it should have just gone for the sad ending at that point since it already had the perfect setup for that. I prefer happy endings of course but you can’t just reverse on a dime and expect it to work.

Overall, Primrose Path is not a particularly good romance film. It’s not a particularly good film in general. It makes way too many mistakes the whole time and the characters are too far gone. The only likable character is the old man who helps Mary out when she needed a ride and is generally supportive the whole time. In fact I would say he was the only character who didn’t have a bunch of big flaws the way that the others did. He was someone you could count on. So yeah definitely skip this film and check something else out instead.

Overall 3/10