You Can Live Forever is queer love story, set in a Jehovah's Witnesses community — and rooted in pain

"Where is your mom?"

"She's not in the truth anymore."

"Do you ever see her?"

"Not since I was six."

"Really?"

"We're supposed to imagine that she's dead."

While it's not how You Can Live Forever begins, that interaction between its two leads does a better job than any to set its tone and scope. The new movie from Canadian writer/director duo Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky — already something of a festival darling and social media semi-sensation — takes that emotional theme and runs with it. Or, if not runs, gazes longingly out a window, as the saddest songs on your '90s playlist echo quietly in the background. 

Because like so many LGBTQ coming-of-age stories before it, You Can Live Forever is about crushing your heart into a pulp. And, like so many of those, it succeeds — though with an added note of misery.   

Originally known as You Can Live Forever in a Paradise on Earth back when the idea was a competitor in Telefilm's 2013 Pitch This! program, the movie takes its title and premise from the Jehovah's Witnesses Christian denomination. That name is a reference to the since discontinued Jehovah's Witnesses publication titled You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth, itself a reference to the belief that a coming "new system of things" will eventually allow people to live eternally in a new heaven and earth. 

In the scope of the movie, all that is primarily experienced and observed by two characters: teen loner Jaime (Ontario's Anwen O'Driscoll) and relative do-gooder Marike (B.C.'s June Laporte). After her father dies and her mother suffers a breakdown, Jaime is sent from her hometown of Thunder Bay to live with her aunt Beth (Liane Balaban) and uncle Jean-Francois (Antoine Yared) in Saguenay, Que.

Though Jaime firmly rejects the religion for herself, both Beth and Jean-Francois's lives are deeply woven into the local Jehovah's Witnesses community. It's a fact that the reserved-to-a-fault Jaime doesn't exactly rebel against, but initially doesn't take much interest in. It's not until meeting the fervently devout Marike that she allows herself to take part in the bible studies, church meetings and field service like all the rest — all while the two move decidedly, and dangerously, beyond friendship. 

Mentally combining a film about a '90s-era religious community with a narrative about gay youth should give you a blueprint for what's to come. Heartache, pain and trauma are tropes so inherently associated with queer kids in cinema that a score of articles interpreted the equally tragic Oscar nominee Close as either adjacent to, or in the LGBTQ canon — despite it having no objectively gay characters. And because it involved suicide, male friendship and tears, so many people assumed Dear Evan Hansen must be about a boy bullied for his queerness they nearly rioted after discovering the actual (though admittedly bonkers) plot. 

Without aping any narratives, the general feeling is just as present in You Can Live Forever — a style choice that, while effective for this story, has already become a suffocating emotional hallmark. 

But however overly relied upon, the hurt Watts and Slutsky inflicted on their characters was cathartic enough to gain a viral following after a 2022 debut at Tribeca Film Festival — and a subsequent Skinamarink-style piracy campaign. Though this time, the film's grassroots popularity came from queer youth who seemingly saw themselves reflected in the film.