88 min | NR | January 27, 2023 | IFC Films
Three couples ride out the early lockdown trapped in their own neuroses and their own expensive homes. Cecilia Miniucchi wants a satire about the privileged coming apart in isolation. The isolation is the only thing that lands.
Three couples move through the early days of the pandemic, sealed inside their comfortable lives. Jonathan Wigglesworth and his wife circle a marriage that has already gone cold. Paul and Rita Hasselberg pick at each other as the world shrinks to the walls of their house. Clarissa Cranes drifts through her own confinement and her own resentments. Cecilia Miniucchi frames all of this as a satire of the privileged coming undone in lockdown. The film is really about people who were miserable long before anyone told them to stay home.
Bob Odenkirk plays Jonathan Wigglesworth as a man whose dry exhaustion never sharpens into anything. He gives the part more weariness than the script earns. Radha Mitchell plays Clarissa Cranes with a brittle unhappiness that holds at one pitch from start to finish. Danny Huston plays Paul Hasselberg as a smug operator who treats the lockdown as an inconvenience to his appetites. Rosie Fellner plays Rita Hasselberg as the wife who absorbs his contempt and hands it back. The actors commit to people the film gives them no reason to like and no room to deepen.
Cecilia Miniucchi writes and directs, and the seams of both jobs show. The film traps its characters in interiors and cross-cuts between the three storylines on a flat, even rhythm. The cutting treats every scene as equally important, so nothing builds toward anything. The homes are staged to read as money, all clean surfaces and tasteful emptiness, but the production design never converts that wealth into meaning. Miniucchi reaches for the claustrophobia of confinement and arrives at monotony. The dialogue announces the themes out loud instead of letting the staging carry them.
The pandemic handed filmmakers a setup with built-in tension. People locked together, forced to confront what they have spent years avoiding. Miniucchi takes that setup and fills it with characters too thin to sustain the attention the confinement demands. The satire finds no target beyond the easy observation that rich people can be unhappy too. There is a version of this material that uses the lockdown to strip its people bare. This one leaves them exactly as shallow as it found them.