A forbidden first love leaves fifteen-year-old Oscar with a camera and a dangerous new theory: that love doesn't add up — it squares. Fourteen years later, both are put to the test.

SYNOPSIS:

Main Premise

A 15-year-old boy named Oscar Wright falls instantly and irrevocably in love with Lily, the vibrant young girlfriend his domineering uncle Geoff brings home on Oscar's birthday. She is ten years older than him, entirely out of reach, and in a relationship with the most powerful man in his world. Over the following 14 years — the span of the film — Oscar runs as far as he can from her (boarding school, photography career, constant movement, emotional unavailability), while Lily stays trapped in Geoff's orbit, slowly being eroded by his control, his infidelity with her own younger sister, drug dependency, a miscarriage, and a suicide attempt. The film asks whether two people who found each other at precisely the wrong moment — wrong ages, wrong power dynamics, wrong timing — can circle back to each other once the conditions that kept them apart have finally collapsed. It also asks what love is, mathematically: Lily's "Love Squared" theory argues that genuine love is not additive (1+1=2) but multiplicative (2²=4), and the film tests and proves that thesis through its structure.