Adam Scott

The Monkey (2025)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I was looking forward to The Monkey with great anticipation. Longlegs was one of my favorite movies of last year, and although I’m colder on The Blackcoat’s Daughter than Brandon is, I’m mostly positive about Osgood Perkins’s overall body of work, so it’s unfortunate that The Monkey didn’t live up to my expectations. Extrapolated from a Stephen King short story about a toy monkey who visits unexplained and supernatural death whenever he clangs his cymbals together, Perkins has reworked the story into one about twin brothers (Christian Convery in the past and Theo James in the present) who find among their long-disappeared father’s belongings a “like life” toy organ grinder monkey. All too quickly, they learn that winding the monkey up by turning its key sets in motion its little drum routine (the cymbal monkey is now under copyright to Disney, for Toy Story reasons), and when it plays its final drumbeat, someone dies. When their mother dies as a result of the monkey’s machinations, they resolve to get rid of it by throwing it down an abandoned well, only for it to resurface twenty-five years later and start to kill the innocent again. 

There’s a lot to like here. This is the first of Perkins’s works to fully commit to being funny for most of its run time, and when it is funny, it’s hilarious. The deaths here are as comically over the top as they come, and not without a bit of Final Destination-esque Rube Goldbergian overdesign that lends them even more humor. The death of Sarah Levy’s character Aunt Ida is a particularly gratuitous one, as she first falls through the basement stairs and gets a face full of fishing hooks for her trouble; but after she painstakingly removes the tackle and sanitizes the wounds with rubbing alcohol, she accidentally lights her face on fire, which sends her running screaming into the night and impaling her head on the real estate post outside of her house. It’s slapstick horror comedy at its best, and when the film focuses on comedic violence, it shines. A woman dives into a swimming pool that has been electrified by a fallen air conditioning unit and, instead of simply being shocked or fried by the current, completely explodes like a water balloon full of human viscera; Uncle Chip gets reduced to little more than ground meat when he’s trampled to death in his sleeping bed by a stampede while out camping. And it’s a delight! 

What doesn’t work and what ends up dragging the film down is the semblance of narrative consistency that it tries to maintain. Adult Hal (the nerdy one) is now divorced and working in a supermarket, and he only sees his son once a year on the kid’s birthday. Upon arriving at the home of his ex-wife’s much more successful new husband, parenthood advice author Ted (Elijah Wood), he learns that Ted plans to adopt Hal’s son Petey (Colin O’Brien) outright, and Hal will lose all custody and visitation rites. His attempts to give his son one last fond memory by taking him to a horror theme park go awry when he learns of the death of his Aunt Ida, who took the boys in as children when their mother (Tatiana Maslany) was killed by the monkey. Believing that the monkey has returned, he goes back to the home and tries to find the monkey so that he can keep it out of the hands of anyone who would use it maliciously, and hilarity ensues as people continue to die—gloriously and gorily—all around him, while he works to keep his son safe from what he believes to be the family’s curse. Elsewhere, Adult Bill (who was the worst kind of piece of shit as a kid) is up to his own schemes, which include seeking the monkey through his own means, including a longstanding reward on the thing, which is claimed by local punk Ricky (Rohan Campbell), who develops his own fascination with the object. 

This is a film that’s front-loaded with all of the best parts, as its opening, set in 1999, follows Bill and Hal as kids and their relationship with their single mother. In the prologue, we learn that their father (Adam Scott) had attempted to return the monkey to a pawn shop, only for the monkey to start its drumbeat, with disastrous results. He does see a flamethrower in the store, however, and uses it on the monkey; this is the last that we see of him, and when the kids ask about their father, their mother reveals that he literally went out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never returned. The relationship between the boys and their mother is a fun one, and while Theo James is a fine enough actor, he cannot help but be unfavorably compared to Maslany, who imbues every one of her Act I scenes with enough charisma, charm, and comedic timing to fill most films. She’s a delight here, especially playing off of Convery, who effectively conveys two very different boys who happened to have shared a womb. Even with a general lack of comedic violence in that opening, there’s still a warmth and a charm that Maslany brings to life (her constant reference to Annie the babysitter as “Babysitter Annie” as if that were her full name is particularly cute). Young Bill is effective as an unrepentant bully who makes Hal’s life hell at home and in school, as he shares embarrassing details about Hal with a gaggle of mean girls that leads to them stealing his pants and pelting him with bananas (because of the monkey). 

Once we move into the present day, things get off to a pretty strong start. I mentioned Aunt Ida’s ignominious death above, and it turns out that the monkey is currently working overtime as the residents of his old hometown are dropping left and right in horrible accidents: real estate agents blown to bolognese bits by poorly maintained firearms, guys falling victim to their own lawn mowers (a possible reference to King’s Maximum Overdrive, as the film is peppered with others, like the fact that Babysitter Annie’s full name is Annie Wilkes), that sort of thing. Where the whole thing falls apart is when it attempts to be sincere, or (more charitably) when its mockery of sincerity is insufficiently dissimilar from the real thing. The relationship between Hal and Petey is one that we have very little investment in, as it’s clear that Hal is all but completely absent from his son’s life, and although it’s made clear that Ted is a strange man, there’s no reason to think that this change in the legal structure of Petey’s family will have much of an impact on him (or Hal) at all. Hal’s constant monologued fears about the potential for the monkey to be a curse on his bloodline didn’t stop him from getting married and having a son in the first place, and that even further precludes us from thinking that he cares about Petey all that much. I’m even less invested in the relationship between the estranged adults Bill and Hal, especially as the more antagonistic of the pair is played much more broadly than the other; it should be either campier or reined in a bit to better match Hal’s energy. Even if the film is trying to mock these relationships, the way that it attempts to rationalize and figure out rules for how the monkey works ground everything to a halt for me, after I was riding pretty high on the comedy of the first half. It’s not that the back half is without its fun moments. An earlier reference to skydiving weddings pays off hilariously and gruesomely in the climax, and the last minute before the credits roll provides another fun payoff that feels like something out of the VHS horror comedy era, and I got a kick out of both. It’s just too uneven and the back half too dull to live up to my expectations. When it’s funny, it’s wickedly funny, but when it’s not, it drags. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Madame Web (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

There’s something very important about movies that are “so bad it’s good” (henceforth SBIG) that a lot of people don’t understand. If you look up a list of these movies, you’ll find some titles that are indisputable: Troll 2, The Room, Battlefield: Earth. But you’ll also see people citing things like Sharknado and Birdemic, and although I think those could be argued to fall under this category, what those films are lacking is a sense of honesty, of earnestness. In the last fifteen years, I can’t think of a single film that was SBIG that disqualified itself from that qualifier by virtue of being too self-aware (not counting Neil Breen, who is the exception that proves the rule). A true SBIG can’t wink at the audience, can’t show its cards, can’t let you know that it’s in on the joke, because then it’s not true. Madame Web is perhaps the first mainstream, studio-released movie in nearly two decades that’s earned this distinction. Like fellow SBIG flick Showgirls, it succeeds by having a main character whose responses to their situation are so bizarre that they’re mesmerizing, and like 1998’s Lost in Space, it’s absolutely filled to the brim with endless ideas, almost all of which are terrible. I went into this movie thinking that it might have all been a ploy by Dakota Johnson to make people forget about her involvement with the Fifty Shades movies by making sure that Madame Web was the film they thought of when they thought of her name (because, admit it, you kinda had until I just mentioned it, hadn’t you?). But by the time that the credits rolled (to The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” inexplicably), I couldn’t wait to own this movie, and I may have to go and see it in theaters again. 

You probably already know what this one is about. Johnson portrays Cassie Webb, a paramedic whose precognitive powers are awakened by a near death experience. She begins to have visions of a man named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) killing three young women, Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced), and sets out to protect them from him. She begins to connect the dots—because her web connects them all—and realizes that she has a past, um, connection to Ezekiel via her mother as, say it with me now, “he was in the Amazon with [her] mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” As she comes to realize, the mother that she has resented for her whole life (Kerry Bishé) for choosing to be deep in the Peruvian jungle—well, not that deep, since she doesn’t work up a sweat hiking to the same spot from a bus stop later in the film, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves—despite being in her last trimester was actually there doing said spider research to prevent Cassie from developing a life-threatening muscular disorder. Also, did I mention that it’s 2003? And did we also mention that Cassie’s partner in the FDNY is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), and that his sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts) is heavily pregnant? 

I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun in a theater. And here’s the thing: despite the incredible negative backlash that the movie has received, it’s actually not that bad. In fact, if this had come out in 1998, it would be one of the best blockbusters of that year. Venom didn’t hit for me, but what people seemed to like about that one was the absolute batshit performance from charm machine Tom Hardy, and this movie is similar insofar as the fact that Dakota Johnson is giving a really fun performance here. Cassie is a bizarre, antisocial weirdo, and I love that for her. Before she falls from a bridge into the water and has to be rescued, the child of someone that she helped save tries to give her a drawing that he made as a way of saying thanks, she behaves as if she’s never encountered a child before and that she thinks this one is trying to give her a manila envelope full of anthrax. Ben has to tell her to take it and just throw it away somewhere else later (Cassie: “I can’t even fold it, it’s like it’s cardboard.”). When one of the other tenants in her building calls her out for leaving her junk mail in the entryway for other people to deal with, Cassie says that there should be a recycling bin for it, but it’s clearly a defensive deflection rather than a passion for the environment. When she boards a train to attend a funeral in Poughkeepsie, a man next to her asks if he is aboard the train headed to Mount Vernon, and she replies “I hope not;” later, when she is fleeing from the ceiling-crawling Ezekiel, she ends up on another train where the same man is seated, who asks again if he’s on the wrong train, and she’s just like “Man, I don’t know,” and her tone is so disdainful that I couldn’t help but fall in love with this character. 

At Mary’s baby shower, Cassie is handed a Pepsi, and Johnson does some of the most bizarre business with a canned soda that you’ve ever seen. She already handled a Mountain Dew Code Red like it was poisoned earlier in the film, but she carries around this unopened Pepsi for almost an entire scene, holding it in one hand while making a claw shape with her other hand that sort of hovers over the top, but she never opens it. I mean this in the most loving way possible, but it honestly looks like Dakota Johnson may have never opened a coke before. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s even a scene where Cassie is sent home by a doctor after trying to get herself tested for her “weird deja vu,” and the doctor tells her to go home and lie on the couch and watch old movies until she feels better; in the next scene, she’s watching Alistair Sim’s A Christmas Carol. This movie is not set at Christmas; in fact, everyone dresses like it’s August or September. There’s a narrative reason for this, that they want to have Cassie talk back to the TV when Scrooge asks the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come “Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that might be?”, but the fact that she’s watching a Christmas movie in the middle of the year is psychotic. And that’s not even getting into the fact that, after rescuing the three girls, she promises them that she’s not abducting them, only to drive them straight to the woods (hilarious) and then tell them that she’ll be back in three hours because she has to go home and dig through her mother’s old journals for more info about “Las Arañas,” the secret Peruvian tribe of Spider People who get powers from spider bites. 

“Flawless” movies are rare, if they exist, but this one is flawful, and although that makes it delightful in many ways, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t some things here that are actually bad. For whatever reason, Rahim is dubbed over in every single scene, and the performance in the ADR is so flat a marble wouldn’t roll off of it. In one of his first scenes, he seduces a woman at the opera and, after they show each other a good time, he awakes next to her from his nightly nightmare, in which a slightly more grey-haired version of himself is killed by the young women that he later pursues. The nightmare sequence is fun, even if it does make it seem like the girls are not going to grow up to be heroes despite the costumes they wear and powers they display, as they do straight up murder him in his vision, but what’s even better is that he relates all of this to the woman in bed with him, babbling, talking about having foreseen his death every time he sleeps for decades. It is revealed that he targeted her specifically, as she has access to NSA tech that he can get his hacker employee (Zosia Mamet) to use to find his victims, but even before he reveals this, she should have been on her way out of the door based purely on his nonsense conspiracy talk, but she was clearly putting up with his conspiracy gobbledygook because she wanted to go a second round, and I respect that. 

The exposition is as inorganic as it could possibly be, the contemporary technology does things that are hilariously impossible, the dubbing is bad, and there are a dozen other things that you can find to complain about if that’s what movies are to you — things to complain about. That’s a way, but it isn’t my way. Maybe I just have big dumb baby brain and every time a scene opened with a shot through some kind of web-like obstruction (breezeblocks, lacy curtains, chain-link fencing, actual cobwebs on chain link fencing) or spiderwebs were evoked in broken glass or the structure of a window was the equivalent of having keys jangled in front of my face, because I was thoroughly entertained. Her web really does connect us all, and in the years to come when the immediate backlash dies down, I expect that this one will get a critical re-evaluation in the same vein as Showgirls. At long last, its hour come round again, another truly great bad movie has entered the chat. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Little Evil (2017)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

When I was a kid, my mom introduced me to the horror classics of her youth whenever I was fortunate enough to be left behind while my father went deer hunting. We watched Carrie, Halloween (which she and my dad had gone to see in the theaters on their first date, although he left halfway through and waited for her in the lobby), and one of her favorites, The Omen. In case there are any among you who have never seen it (and shame on you), The Omen stars Gregory Peck as an American diplomat whose child dies at birth; he is convinced to adopt a local orphan instead. He and his unwitting wife name the child Damien, and as the child grows he starts to suspect, correctly, that little Damien is the Antichrist. There were a few sequels (including one where the adult Damien, played by Sam Neill, is an American politician) and a remake released on the apropos date of 06/06/06.

Although the remake is one of the better revisitations and reimaginings of the early millennium (perhaps helped by the fact that I find both Julia Stiles and Liev Schreiber to be quite charming), my new favorite follow-up is 2017’s Little Evil. Adam Scott plays Gary Bloom, the new husband of Samantha (Evangeline Lilly) and thus stepfather to Lucas (Owen Atlas), who dresses and acts just like Damien, including using a “goat” sock puppet to talk in a low demonic voice. Samantha is completely blind to (or hilariously complacent about) the blatantly supernatural events happening around her: bloody rain, flickering lights, the backwards speech of the priest at their wedding, even Lucas’s use of a compelling voice to tell his teachers to kill themselves.

Gary gets conflicting and terrible advice from the other stepfathers in his community, including Victor (Kyle Bornheimer), Wayne (Chris D’Elia), and Larry (Donald Faison). The best and worst of these is Al (Lady Dynamite‘s Bridget Everett), his co-worker and a woman so butch she considers herself to be a part of the stepdad community. Everett all but steals the show here; she’s hilarious, and her deadpan delivery of her lines about her own stepson and her relationship with the new wife are perfectly timed and exquisite. Rounding out the case are the always-welcome Sally Field as a social worker and Clancy Brown as Reverend Gospel, an end-times theologian.

After Lucas causes his birthday clown to set himself on fire, Child Protective Services gets involved just as Gary seeks out professional help, including the assistance of a demon hunter, just as in The Omen. But unlike The Omen, Little Evil evolves into a story about something else: fatherhood, and the need for good role models. The film ultimately makes a surprisingly heartwarming statement about the nature of paternity and the importance of love over biology.

The film is not without a few low points, of course. There is a bit of the film that drags in the middle, as it gets wrapped up in some of the typical dudebro lowbrow comedy that we’ve come to expect from directors like Judd Apatow, but director Eli Craig (who gave us the fantastic horror comedy/pastiche Tucker and Dale vs. Evil back in 2010) shifts back into gear pretty quickly after this, and the high points more than make up for the less-than-perfect moments. Lilly is also a high point of recommendation; embodied by another actress, Samantha might have come across as dim-witted or inept, but Lilly finds the perfect balance between defensive (but lovingly) maternal and comically missing the point.

Little Evil is a Netflix original, so it’s presumably not going anywhere soon. If I were you, I’d use the last days of January to watch as much Futurama as you can before it leaves the streaming platform at the end of the month. But when that’s done, go back and check out this easy-going comedy. And also, watch The Omen if you haven’t already, you Philistine!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Krampus (2015)

/ swampflix / 14 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

When I first became aware of Michael Dougherty’s Krampus, I was ecstatic because I absolutely love Christmas horror films (Silent Night, Deadly Night, Gremlins, Santa’s Slay, etc.). What’s not to love about a film based on what is essentially the opposite of Santa? A demon that goes around punishing little brats that misbehave sounds like a good time to me. I got even more excited when I found out that Toni Collette, my all-time favorite actress, was playing a lead role in the film. This was a movie made for me, so needless to say, I had pretty high expectations. Thankfully, Krampus did not disappoint.

Other than it being a horror film about a murderous Christmas beast, one of the weirdest things about Krampus is that it made it to the big screen. Most Christmas horror movies go straight to DVD. I can’t even remember the last time a Christmas horror film was in theaters. It may have been the 2006 remake of Black Christmas, but I’m not quite sure. Anyway, it’s always a good sign when a campy movie makes it to theaters. Krampus brought in over $16,000,000 on its opening weekend, which is pretty impressive considering its campy reputation. Bad taste is alive and well!

The film begins with a hilarious but disturbingly truthful Black Friday scene that will give you all the feels. Bing Crosby’s “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas” plays as a mob of greedy customers wreak havoc on a retail store. The audience in the movie theater gave out a few good laughs for this part, but a good bit of the crowd had on their “ain’t it the truth” face. Among the people in the retail store are the film’s main characters: husband/wife duo Tom (Adam Scott) and Sara (Toni Collette) and their 10-year-old son, Max (Emjay Anthony).

Max is old enough to know that Santa is not real, but there’s a part of him that just can’t give up on believing in Santa. It’s as though his belief in Santa represents his want to have a normal, enjoyable holiday with his family. Max’s German grandmother (Krista Stadler) is very supportive of his belief, and she encourages him to write a letter to Santa. He eventually becomes upset and rips up his Santa letter, throwing the pieces out of his bedroom window. By doing this, he unintentionally summons Krampus, but Krampus does not arrive to Max’s home alone. He brings a couple of demonic toys, gingerbread men, and elves with him, and they do most of the dirty work. And by “dirty work,” I mean that they execute most of the murders. The evil elves and possessed toys were actually pretty frightening, but the demonic gingerbread men were totally unnecessary. Actually, I can honestly say that they were the only reason I didn’t give this movie five stars. They were terrible! And not even in the good way.

Something that I noticed in Krampus was the abundance of tongue action. One of the demonic toys, which is an angel doll, uses its tongue while it attacks Sarah. This really gross, super thin tongue comes out of this creepy toy’s mouth, and it’s absolutely terrifying. Also, Krampus has a weird tongue thing going on as well. When he comes face to face with Max, he has a tongue very similar to the angel doll, and he licks the poor kid’s face. While all this was going on, I couldn’t help but think of Beth Grant tonguing that mannequin in September’s Movie of the Month, The Boyfriend School.

Krampus is definitely going into my traditional Christmas watchlist, along with Home Alone, A Christmas Story, and Miracle on 34th Street. It’s got the perfect balance of comedy and horror. There are times where you’ll be crying from laughter, but there will be times that you’ll come close to peeing your pants from fear.

-Britnee Lombas

Black Mass (2015)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

What the hell has Johnny Depp been doing for the last decade? It used to be that every new Depp performance was worth getting excited about, but the last time I can remember being impressed with him was as the notorious reprobate John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester in 2004’s The Libertine. Everything since feels like a formless blur of pirates, Tontos, and CGI chameleons. No matter. Depp has returned to his past life as a solid, exciting actor in another formally middling biopic packed to the gills with great performances, Black Mass. With his receding hairline, hideous teeth, ever-present aviators & pinky rings, and eyes so grey-blue they almost make him look blind, Depp plays the infamous South Boston crimelord Whitey Bulger like a strange cross between Hunter S. Thompson & Nosferatu. It’s a measured, but menacing performance that proves Depp still has it in him to terrify & captivate, completely transforming beyond recognition & losing himself in his best role of the past decade.

The worst accusation that can be thrown at Black Mass is that it’s a little formally & narratively overfamiliar. The film doesn’t bring anything particularly fresh to the 70s-era organized crime drama format, calling to mind works from names like Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and Martin Scorsese in nearly every scene. In fact, because of the thick Boston accents inherent to Whitey Bulger & The Winter Hill Gang it’s easy to pinpoint a specific point of reference in Scorsese’s oeuvre that Black Mass can be accused of being a little too reminiscent of: The Departed. Just know that if you’re looking forward to this film as a fan of that genre there’s not going to be long stretches of brutal violence & gunfire that usually accompany organized crime films. Black Mass has its moments of brutality, sure, limited mostly to bursts of fist to face sadism & quick bursts of assassination, but for the most part it’s a calm story of political intrigue. The movie is almost entirely focused on the real-life Bulger’s secretive “alliance” with the FBI that allowed the two agencies to work together to eradicate the Italian mafia from Boston, making room for Bulger to bloom from a small time crime boss into an all-powerful kingpin. Black Mass is concerned with the audio surveillance tapes, buried/forged paperwork, and back alley dealings with the federal government that allowed for Bulger’s rise to power much more than it is with his murderous deeds, which amount to exactly one onscreen shooting & two strangling on Depp’s bloody hands. Bulger is terrifying, but the threat he poses is more systemic than it is physical, making for a film that may have defied the more bloodthirsty expectations of its audience. I noticed quite a few viewers at our screening checking their cellphones in the second & third acts . . .

Any muted expectations I had for Black Mass based on its 70s-era crime drama familiarity (an aesthetic that somehow hilariously continues well into the 90s in the film’s timeline) were surpassed merely on the merit of its performances. Besides Depp’s horrifying, career-revitalizing turn as Whitey Bulger, there’s also great, unexpected screen presence from Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott, Dakota Johnson, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Sarsgaard, and, my personal favorite, Julianne Nichlson (who was fantastic in both Boardwalk Empire & Masters of Sex and whom I only want the best things for). This is an actor’s movie. The 70s crime pastiche is merely a backdrop for the absurdly talented cast’s parade of heavy Boston accents & emotional turmoil. The screenplay offers very little in terms of surprise. Of course Bulger is the kind of gangster that is gentle & neighborly with old ladies, but will have a man killed for threatening to punch him in a bar. Of course, despite his official status as a “top echelon informant”, he’s prone to saying things like, “I don’t consider this ratting or informing. This is business.” Of course, because this is a gangster movie, the script is a long procession of a million “fuck”s, one with just a few homophobic & anti-Italian slurs thrown in there for good measure. I consistently got the feeling that we’ve all seen this play out countless times before, but I still enjoyed it a great deal. Just as a particularly corrupt FBI agent justifies his involvement with Bulger as “a little white lie to protect the bigger truth”, Black Mass is a little, unassuming movie worthwhile for how it supports such a massive list of excellent performances, Depp’s return to form, believe it or not, being just one drop in the bucket.

-Brandon Ledet

The Overnight (2015)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Usually, filmmakers have a tendency to keep their dark comedy & their sex romps separate. Full-blown sex comedies are usually mindless entertainment more concerned with raunchy gags than existential contemplation & while a black comedy might lighten the mood with an occassional sexual diversion (last year’s sadistic Cheap Thrills comes to mind), it’s rare that sex is its main focus. Even the recent raunch fest Wetlands, which I absolutely loved, kept its dark streak separate from its hedonism, a difficult task for a movie mostly remembered for its ungodly volume of on-screen semen. There might be a reluctance in blending the sexual with the menacing both because it’s awkward to take sex seriously & because sexual menace is difficult to play for a laugh for reasons that should be more than obvious without explanation.

In The Overnight, we have a surprisingly successful homogeneous blend of the black comedy & the sex romp, one where both elements are fused together completely instead of played off each other for a contrasting effect. The movie strikes a consistently terrifying tone through its depiction of underhanded sexual coercion, but somehow never loses grasp of the sillier raunch tangents you’d expect in a typical sex comedy. The effect of this powerful combination is that the sex gags are twice as funny as they’d normally play, thanks to the way they relieve overbearing tension of the the film’s sexual menace. In a lot of ways The Overnight follows the typical party out of bounds story structure of classic black comedies like The Exterminating Angel & Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where in-over-their-heads guests feel compelled to remain at a social function even though the mood has soured, but the four characters at the center of this particular party out of bounds & their surprising tenderness for each other are unique to the genre. It’s a very well-written example of a very familiar story that I have a huge soft-spot for.

Besides the deft balance & gradual escalation of the razor sharp script, The Overnight‘s strongest asset is its cast. Adam Scott & Taylor Schilling are fantastic as the befuddled North Westerners struggling to decide if their Los Angeles party hosts are just having a California-style good time or if they’re swingers trying to take their newfound friends to bed. Jason Schwartzman & Judith Godrèche steal the show as the film’s sexual menace, making both sly & overt sexual advances through maneuevers as simple as a hand on a knee and as ludicrous as an art studio packed with abstract paintings of buttholes. It’s difficult to decide through most of The Overnight whether the L.A. couple is taking advantage of their more uptight out-of-towners guests or if they’re apparent sweetness is genuine. The tension between those two competing readings is a great dynamic and both tones could be read in some of the film’s best scenes, like in a stoned, strobe-lit dance party or in a literal dick-measuring contest by the poolside. It’s a testament to the film’s effectiveness that what lingers in your mind after the credits is not the film’s individual sex gags, but rather the implications of the relationships that form between the film’s two central couples. It’s both an equally fun & terrifying experience, as well as a must-see for fans of Jason Schwartzman at his most mischievous.

-Brandon Ledet