Warning: major spoilers for Death on the Nile below
Kenneth Branagh’s new movie Death on the Nile is a fantastic watch, and if you haven’t already seen it, you should. This article will explore how the movie embodies the flaws in the modern concept of love as a feeling rather than an action.
In Death on the Nile, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) and Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) are a couple so desperately in love that they are driven to commit murder to secure their future together. The movie starts with a clip of Simon and Jacqueline in a risque dance to show their passion for each other, and then cuts to Simon’s marriage to Jacqueline’s best friend, Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). The rest of the cast express their general distaste, but shrug their shoulders with the sentiment that love is love and it can’t be controlled. Linnet, Simon’s new lover, is also found to have left her prior fiancé as well.
The movie consistently flirts with the idea that love justifies anything. While it gets a “what can you do” attitude when it’s just jilted fiancés, the film culminates with the revelation that Jaqueline had Simon trick Linnet into marrying him and then killing her so they could inherit her fortune and run away together.
By showing the extreme case, the film forces the audience to question whether the premise that anything is justified by love is really justifiable. On closer examination, it isn’t.
This teaching has been the consistent Christian teaching on love since the founding of the Church. Romantic love is among the best things in life, but it is not the key to happiness.
Of all the emotions, love, particularly sexual love, makes the greatest promises. It claims that our everlasting happiness is to be found there. It tells us that we will go on being in love forever. Jaqueiline confesses these exact feelings over the course of the movie.
However, these promises are a lie. We’ve all experienced having friends who are hopelessly in love, and knowing that they will not continue to feel that intense passion just a few months down the road. Jaqueline’s fellow travelers all see this so clearly in her, yet fail to acknowledge it in their relationships.
The saddest part of Jaqueline and Simon’s story is that, even if they got away with murder, their future would not be infinite marital bliss; it would be the same messy eventualities of married life we all deal with.
When Christians speak of love, it is not eros but agape. Jesus commands us to love our enemies, yet we cannot control our feelings. If Jesus meant that we must feel good feelings towards our enemies forever, then his command is impossible. Instead, Jesus asks us to will the good of our enemies. Even harder, to will the good of our partners even when the romantic “high” has faded. That’s only possible with love as an act rather than a feeling.
None of us are likely to commit murder out of love soon, but Death on the Nile shows us the consequences of viewing love as a feeling. Adultery and divorce both spring from the same well. Instead, we are called to remember that there is only one type of love that will make us eternally happy. Jaqueline’s longing for love is understandable. There is a type of love where if you miss it life is practically a waste, but it’s not Simon’s, it’s Gods. Death on the Nile helps remind us where our hearts ought to lie, and that is the film’s greatest triumph.
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Nick Letts is a former “radical atheist” who converted to Protestantism as a senior in High School, and then converted to Catholicism as a Junior in college. He studies philosophy in the Morrissey College, and loves nothing more than to curl up with a good book. He is engaged to his lovely fiancée Katherine Brown.
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