Jonathan Sim
Some movies announce themselves quietly and then refuse to let go. Affection is one of them. Afflicted by a mysterious condition that resets her memory, Ellie (Jessica Rothe) becomes trapped in a cyclical nightmare with a man who claims to be her husband. She must uncover the horrifying truth of her existence before she forgets it all again. It is a film built on dread and repetition, on the particular terror of not knowing who to trust and on the question of what love looks like when it curdles into obsession.
To bring it to life, writer-director BT Meza assembled a tight, fearless team and took them to the rolling farmland of Bovina, New York, where they made something genuinely unsettling in about four weeks. The result is a debut that announces a filmmaker worth watching and performances that linger long after the credits roll.
Meza, who wrote the script in 2017, drew on a specific lineage of horror when shaping the film. “I’m a huge fan of movies like The Fly, The Thing,” he said. “These movies where an ordinary person gets thrown into this extraordinary situation and kind of goes through hell.” The pandemic delayed the project’s path to production, but executive producer Christian’s enthusiasm for the script eventually got it moving.
“Coming out of the pandemic, I shared the script with him and he was a big fan of it,” Meza recalled, “and yeah, we ended up making it happen.” For his feature debut, Meza brought a vision precise enough to stretch a modest budget across something that feels much larger. “It forces you to think really creatively,” he said of working with limited resources. “How can you get away with something as economical as possible, but at the same time put as much on the screen as you can?” Practical effects artist Dan Rebert was instrumental in answering that question, delivering the film’s visceral physical moments with craft and ingenuity.
At the center of Affection is Rothe, who plays Ellie with the kind of full-body commitment that leaves an actor exhausted and an audience breathless. “At the end of these days I was exhausted,” she said, “because the role demanded so much both physically and emotionally.” Rothe, who is no stranger to genre, having anchored both Happy Death Day films with a ferocious comic-horror energy, brought a different, rawer frequency to Ellie. “I love getting into the muck of just what it means to be human. And I love pushing myself. I’m always the person who’s like, ‘One more! I know I can do it better.’ Like a rabid dog just trying to excavate every single square inch of what this moment could be and what this character could be going through.”
To find Ellie’s physicality—the tremoring, the seizing, the body in revolt—Rothe worked with physical coach Ellie Hayman, a BU classmate who practices the Michael Chekhov method. “It’s all about finding a physical gesture that then unlocks something emotional in you,” Rothe explained. “Not only did we find physical gestures for Ellie throughout the story and in every different scene, but she also helped me with the tremoring and the seizing that happens in this film.”
The result was a kind of radical surrender. “It was just about giving my body radical permission to go there. And then once I went there, the doing of it wasn’t as hard, but once I was done, I felt like I had run a marathon.” Between takes, co-star Joseph Cross helped her find her footing again. At the end of shoot days, or more often, in the gray-light hours after an all-night shoot, she’d go home and FaceTime her husband, ask him to show her pictures of their dog, and put on Parks and Recreation until the world felt manageable again.
Meza spoke of watching Rothe work with barely concealed awe. “Every day on set, I was just in awe of her performance,” he said. “It was such a great time for me just working with her and seeing where she took the character.” His favorite memory from the shoot was their very first day of production: the scene in which Ellie wakes up and Bruce lays out her situation to her. “I remember sitting there on set and watching it—it was one of the first things we shot—and both Jess and Joe did such a fantastic job. I felt so great watching them perform in that moment. When I look back on it, that’s kind of the moment that started off everything that came after.”
Joseph Cross plays Bruce, the man at the center of Ellie’s nightmare, a man whose sincerity and menace are nearly impossible to separate. It is exactly the kind of role that invites an actor to play to the audience, to wink or to signal, and Cross refuses every such invitation. “I’m more focused on what Ellie is thinking,” he said plainly. “I’ll let BT kind of do his job in terms of thinking about what the audience is thinking.” Without giving too much away, Bruce is a man consumed by grief, by a refusal to let go of what he once had. “I first understood his journey in terms of someone who is refusing to accept life as it has come at him,” Cross said. “Refusing to grieve, and thinking that he can correct this event that has happened in his life and that he can put the pieces back together of this family that he was so committed to, that he loved so much. To me, that is Bruce’s origin story; that’s why he sets out on this journey.”
Cross is a veteran who has worked with Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Gus Van Sant. He spoke about what that accumulated experience lends to a project like this one, not techniques borrowed wholesale, but a kind of steadiness that comes from having seen how it’s done at the highest levels. “Every movie you make, you build on the last one, and the ones before that, and hopefully you get a little bit better with each one,” he said. “What’s kind of cool is that all those guys made their first movie at one point. All those guys were in BT’s position at a certain point.” The collaborative spirit of the Affection set—the way the production adapted, problem-solved, and found its scenes in real time—seemed to suit him. “Because everybody is so collaborative, you’re able to find something even more exciting than what was on the page, because it’s up on its feet and you’re bringing it to life.”
Nature, it turns out, had its own contribution to make. A flood struck during production, knocking out power and submerging the parking lot where the producers were staying. “We were making a movie about a man fighting nature,” Cross noted with dry appreciation, “and so we all got to experience a little bit of fighting nature to make the movie. It felt full circle in that sense.”
The shoot lasted about four or five weeks in total. It was compressed, intense, and full of the on-the-fly creative decisions that low-budget filmmaking demands. “It is so hard, beginning to end, to make a movie,” Cross said. “We do it because it’s worth it, but it’s not easy. It takes a lot of people who really, really want to see something come into existence.”
The film is, at its core, about memory, what we hold onto, what gets taken from us, and what people will do to preserve the shape of a life they’ve lost. It’s a theme that seemed to shadow the conversations around the film, prompting each of its makers to reach back into their own personal archives. For Rothe, working in Bovina meant long carpools with Cross during the night shoots, driving home together at five in the morning, both of them “slap-happy and loopy,” decompressing in the dark. “Our crew was so wonderful and hardworking and nice and talented,” she said. “It really felt like summer camp. We just had a really, really good time.”
Meza, for his part, is already thinking about what comes next—other stories with heat and strangeness in them. “I’m always a fan of stories with heart,” he said, “and stories about people who are really struggling with difficult situations and get put through hell during the process. Anything to do with horror and sci-fi, wrapped around a story that really has a beating heart, that’s the kind of thing I’m really into.” As for what he hopes audiences take from Affection itself: “I hope that it really lingers with people for a while. We really tried to make a film that had something new each time you watch it. So really, I hope that people can watch this multiple times and each time discover something new with it.”
There is something fitting about a film obsessed with repetition being made by people who clearly fell in love with the process of making it—who would, one suspects, do it all over again if they could. For Rothe, Meza, and Cross, Affection was a hard-won thing, built in floods and night shoots and marathon days and silly predawn car rides. The movie knows what it is. It just wants to make sure you don’t forget it.
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