There are periods where Drive becomes my favourite film of all time. This is one of those periods.

I rewatched this with my friend who similarly adores this film, and knowing all of the trivia and parallels of this films only made me adore it more. There's no film is existence that I've poured myself into more, that I have dedicated time to finding out everything I can about the production of this absolute masterwork.

Drive, at its heart, is a romance, really. A romance not of quippy dialogue or melodramatic plot beats, but of two people just having a genuine, quiet emotional connection. When Irene looks at Driver, and when Driver looks at Irene, I feel that in the pits of my stomach. It feels real. When I watch them, I feel about them like I do about the person in real life I feel that way about, that feeling of falling in love with someone just by sharing the same space and it all just comes at once. It's so palpable, this film just makes me miss that person even more and savour all the time spent with them.

Combine that with the film's The Scorpion and the Frog parallels, making it a blood-soaked fairytale of a frog who literally carries a scorpion on his back, but ultimately gets stung and has everything taken away from him. That's what he gets for carrying around criminals, or scorpions.

It's a beautiful display of absolute, resolute vision that's unwavering and uncompromised. A film that is so perfect in every scene that I can sit here on a fourth viewing and still have my heart ripped out of my stomach when Irene knocks on that door at the end of the film. Even the way she turns back, still holding out the hope that the man she loves is there.

But he isn't. He's been stung.