As is all too common these days, Enduring Love takes an intriguing premise and then flushes it down the toilet. In a stunning opening five minutes, Joe (Daniel Craig) sees a grounded hot air balloon having problems, with wind threatening to whisk away the balloon and the young boy inside. Joe and some other men rush to hold down the balloon, but the wind carries it up even still and the men are forced to let go and fall to the ground before the balloon gets too high – except for one man who hold on until he can no longer bear it and plummets to his death.

Throughout the rest of the film, Joe is disturbed by the event. If they had all held on, they might have brought the balloon down. Is Joe partially responsible for the man’s death? It’s an interesting problem and the film begins to address it when it suddenly hijacks itself into a bizarre storyline. Jed (Rhys Ifans), another man at the balloon event, wants to talk about it with Joe, but we eventually learn that Jed’s intentions are something else.

To make things more interesting, Joe is a university professor of some sort who has published a book on his theory that emotions are all fake – all biological creations formed for self-preservation and reproduction. Joe’s non-belief in emotions, including love, obviously creates problems with his girlfriend, Claire (Samantha Morton), who, as an artist, appears to be on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. How these two ever got together in the first place or why this issue hasn’t been a problem in the relationship before is not addressed. But with the trigger of the balloon-incident, it’s certainly causing problems now.

Enduring Love, clearly, has set up some great issues and asks some great questions, but offers us no answers. It reduces itself to a strange thriller of sorts, invoking the basest tensions in the midst of its high minded ideas. Warmly filmed, with great performances, Enduring Love takes the form of a great film, but never fills it.

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