I Love My Dad

A desperate father poses as a young woman online in order to reconnect with his estranged son, but things get complicated when the young man falls in love with this young woman.

I Love My Dad is apparently based on a true story, which is a horrifying thing to contemplate. The writer/director/star’s father actually pretended to be someone else online in order to be close to his son, who had blocked him on social media. That’s as much as I know, so maybe that’s the only part that actually happened, but in the movie at least, Patton Oswalt plays the father who ends up catfishing his son by pretending to be a young woman who friends his son online, who then becomes his son’s online girlfriend, who his son eventually wants to become his real-life girlfriend.

To call I Love My Dad a “cringe comedy” is an understatement.

It’s such a crazy idea, so incredibly sad, cruel, and obviously fraught with so many simply awful potential issues… you really have no other option then to laugh. Patton Oswald continues his cinematic career of playing complicated but endearing weirdos, something he does so well, which is a good for the film, because without that, I doubt you’d be able to see his character as anything other than a complete sociopath and an absolute monster, even after the inevitable crash plays out.

Patton Oswald, Lil Rel Howery, and Rachel Dratch are all powerhouse comedic presences, and they bring to this film exactly what you’d want them to, but they also add some surprising nuances to their performances too that I really appreciated. So that was good.

The film depicts the online chat conversations, that is the main way the characters communicate, in a good way too, by putting the two actors into the scene together as if having a real life conversation, allowing their performances to play off one another. Because of this approach, Claudia Sulewski, who plays the imaginary girlfriend, as well as her real world basis, ends up giving the film’s most impressive performance. Her online character really does feel like Oswalt’s character is voicing her. She’s so good, in fact, that when we finally see the “real” her again in the third act, the little changes between the two versions of the character clearly highlight just how much of an illusion the entire relationship was, bringing an extra layer of emotion to the big climax. Really good stuff.

Overall, I Love My Dad is as cringey as you’d expect, but also much better than you’d think it will be. It’s a nice little dramedy, definitely worth checking out.