On love, loyalty, and the world around

With some time off during the festive season — the kind of time off that makes you notice the passage of days rather than rest — I found myself watching a couple of films that circle something apparently fashionable in contemporary storytelling: devotion, utter trust, a form of love so complete it no longer asks to be verified.

In Black Bag and Villains, love is assumed. It operates as a closed circuit. The characters move like all questions have been answered long ago.

In Black Bag, the central relationship is built on absolute mutual recognition. Both partners inhabit a world of intelligence, secrecy, and surveillance. They lie professionally. They manipulate systems. They treat opacity not as an exception, but as terrain. What matters is disclosure between them — unhurried, total, eventually complete. Once everything is spoken internally, no external ethical boundary seems to hold. The bond is solid enough to justify collateral damage. People around them see it, dare to admire it. And to preserve it, they will burn the world down without hesitation.

Villains offers two variations on the same logic.
The younger couple operates on instinctive, almost careless loyalty. They act as a unit before they understand consequence. The older couple is more experienced, more contained — their bond already worn smooth by time, violence, and erosion. One improvises, the other refines. Both are sealed inward.

he outside world exists as interference. Love the reference point in compromised environments.

In Black Bag, surveillance and secrecy are infrastructure. In Villains, brutality is playful, aestheticized. Once loyalty is established, everything else becomes negotiable.

And that’s the part that lingered.

We live inside systems that normalize strategic silence, outsourced violence, and moral abstraction. Against that background, unconditional loyalty doesn’t immediately register as danger. It feels like shelter. A private coherence inside a public incoherence.

As 2025 ends, I’m not sure whether these stories are fables or destinations. Nothing in the real world is ever absolutely wicked or absolutely good.