Why Do You Love Me

The Road Less Traveled (And Why It’s Bumpy)

I’ve seen this story before—the coming-of-age road trip, the motley crew of misfits, the promise of self-discovery wrapped in a few hundred miles of open highway. But Why Do You Love Me isn’t just another iteration of the formula. It’s a remake of Hasta La Vista, the 2011 Belgian film about three young men with disabilities determined to lose their virginity, and in its best moments, it feels like a necessary corrective to the way we usually tell stories about desire, agency, and the bodies we’re born into.

That said, it’s also a film that can’t quite outrun its own brevity, leaving some of its most promising ideas stranded on the side of the road.

Herwin Novianto’s direction is warm, almost tactile, as if he’s trying to wrap the audience in the same blanket of camaraderie that his characters share. The film opens with Baskara (Adipati Dolken), Danton (Jefri Nichol), and Miko (Onadio Leonardo) in a Jakarta apartment, their disabilities—paraplegia, a brain tumor, blindness—rendered with a matter-of-factness that’s refreshing.

There’s no grand speech about overcoming adversity, no inspirational montage set to swelling music. Instead, there’s just the quiet, persistent hum of wanting: wanting to be touched, to be desired, to be seen as something other than a diagnosis. The decision to embark on a road trip to Surabaya, where a brothel supposedly caters to men with disabilities, is less about the destination than the act of claiming something for themselves.

That’s where the film’s heart lies—not in the punchlines or the occasional slapstick, but in the way it treats its characters’ desires as neither tragic nor triumphant, but simply human.

And yet, for all its good intentions, Why Do You Love Me feels like it’s in a hurry. At 84 minutes, it’s a film that barely has time to catch its breath, let alone dig into the complexities of its premise. The road trip itself is more a series of vignettes than a sustained journey, with entire emotional arcs compressed into single scenes.

One moment, Baskara is raging against the world’s low expectations; the next, he’s softened by a shared joke or a moment of vulnerability. It’s not that these shifts feel unearned, exactly, but they do feel rushed, as if the film is afraid to linger too long in any one emotional register. (I kept waiting for a scene where the characters actually talk about what they’re feeling, rather than letting the audience infer it from a glance or a gesture.