96 min | R | November 10, 2023 | Lionsgate
Jesse Eisenberg plays an expectant father who falls in with a cult of celibate men who call themselves a family. The deeper he goes, the more the rage underneath comes loose. The ideas are sharper than the film built around them.
Ralphie drives for a rideshare app and waits for his pregnant girlfriend to give birth. He has no money, no father, and no map for the man he is supposed to become. He drifts into the orbit of Dan, the patriarch of a libertarian commune of celibate men who treat masculine rage as a wound to be honored. John Trengove builds the film around the gap between what these men say they offer and the violence they actually cultivate. The subject is the machinery that turns male loneliness into menace.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Ralphie as a coiled spring. He keeps his shoulders hunched and his voice low until the pressure finds an exit. Eisenberg locates the specific terror of a man who cannot name what he wants and hates himself for wanting it. Adrien Brody plays Dan with a soft, paternal calm that masks something predatory. He speaks in the soothing register of a self-help guru and recruits the broken with patience. Odessa Young plays Sal, Ralphie’s girlfriend, as the one person who sees him clearly, and the film gives her too little to do with that clarity.
Trengove directs his own screenplay with a grim, desaturated palette that drains warmth from every interior. The camera holds tight on Eisenberg’s face and traps the audience inside his paranoia. The score pulses with low dread and signals the eruption long before it arrives. The technique is controlled and deliberate. The script underneath it is schematic. Trengove states his thesis about toxic masculinity early and then arranges scenes to confirm it rather than complicate it.
This is a film with a strong central performance and a clear point of view that does not trust either to do the work. The provocation is real. The incel commune, the bottled rage, the inheritance of an absent father all point at something true about how men break. The execution flattens that material into illustration. Eisenberg gives Ralphie a full interior life and the writing keeps reducing him to a symptom.