Twentysomething Alice is a dreamer.
She wants true love, intense love, and reciprocated love. She is not finding it in the clubs with her girlfriend, though, and her current boyfriend is clearly not into her. You can hear it in his voice on the phone before he brutally dumps her in person.
But she is young, and attractive, and willing to do anything, including a pact with the Devil, a glowing-eyed man who prefers the booth in the back of the local dive bar, to make this happen with the next fellow who comes along. That would the be tall, dark and slightly dim Luke, a goth-adjacent photographer with a slow manner of speaking and a voice that is a dead ringer for Ryan Gosling.
Pacts with the Devil, of course, do their thing, here involving Alice vomiting up a occult knife, and developing an insatiable hunger for blood and penetration.
My Love For You Is Deep, But The Devil Loves Me Deeper is, at its pink-glowing heart, mostly an aesthetic experience. It is built from the ground up to resemble a modest-budgeted made-for-TV movie from the early 2000s, and shot on a rather iconic camera from the era (the Panasonic DBX100B), and conspicuously framed in Pan-and-Scan aspect ratio. It starts with a Cable TV bumper prior to the film's credits. The pacing is intentionally stilted, as if it is trying to hit the 90ish-minute mark to fulfil its cable-programming obligations.
At times, this DIY experiment, made for less than $100,000, sits between the earnest-but-frankly-sexual horror of Twin Peaks, and pop-rocks candy music videos of that era. It is the cheapo erotic vampire horror that came on even later than the Buffy-esque TV show the characters watched in I Saw The TV Glow. It is a fever dream of lap-dissolve transitions and saturated colour palettes, one which evokes cinema-remix culture and VHS-noise festishization of RacerTrash and its descendants, but remains very much its own thing. Dark shots, right at the limit of miniDV, of the same stretch of city streets at night, abound.
At one point, there is a particular slick overheard shot of Alice, in the throes of possession-induced pain, where the camera spins in ways that communicate her suffering in ways that only cinema can. Otherwise, the acting is particularly mannered, intentional or not is debatable, but it certainly fits the Cinemax (or Showtime AfterHours, if you were into that sort of thing) energy, only with more occult undertones. It mainly gets out of the way of the compositing, and the post-production room, where the real magic occurs.
The intent, and the execution here astutely fulfil director Casey Donahue’s mission statement: To mimic the experience of stumbling across something weird on 24-hour cable in the wee hours, and simply going with the flow of mild insomnia and unrequited horniness. Is it empty calories? Sure. But the sugar rush is undeniable.
The film screened at the 2026 Toronto After Dark Film Festival.