78 min | NR | April 2, 2021 | Utopia
A young woman juggling a sugar daddy and a directionless life walks into a shiva and finds both her ex-girlfriend and her benefactor already there. His wife and baby come too. The funeral is for someone else, but the corpse onscreen is her composure.
Danielle is a college senior with no real plan, a sugar daddy she lies about, and parents who still treat her like a child. She attends a shiva with her mother and father and walks into a slow-motion ambush. Her sugar daddy is there. So is his accomplished wife and their screaming infant. So is Maya, the ex-girlfriend who has her life together in every way Danielle does not. The film is not about a death. It is about a young woman watching every separate lie she tells collide inside one cramped house full of relatives who will not stop asking if she has eaten.
Rachel Sennott plays Danielle as a performance of competence stretched past its breaking point. She smiles through interrogations about her major and her weight and her plans while her eyes track every threat in the room. Sennott lets the panic leak out in small physical tells. A broken glass, a smeared bagel, a forced laugh that lands a half-second too late. Molly Gordon plays Maya with a confidence that doubles as a weapon, and the old chemistry between them keeps curdling into rivalry. Polly Draper and Fred Melamed play Danielle’s parents as loving and oblivious, narrating her failures to a crowd while she stands beside them. Dianna Agron plays Kim, the wife, with a poise that makes Danielle’s own fictions feel even flimsier.
Emma Seligman directs and writes her first feature with the structure of a horror movie. She traps the entire story in one house over a few hours and lets the walls close in. Ariel Marx’s score abandons comedy convention entirely. It is all anxious strings and stabbing dissonance, the kind of sound design built for a slasher, and it turns small talk into dread. Maria Rusche’s camera stays tight on faces and bodies in crowded frames, so every shot feels overpopulated and airless. Seligman cuts on flinches and interruptions, never letting Danielle or the audience catch a breath.
This is a film about the specific terror of being seen accurately by people who love you. Danielle has built a self out of half-truths and the shiva strips them one by one in front of an audience that means well. Seligman understands that the worst place to have a panic attack is a room where everyone keeps handing you food. She compresses the whole thing into a single sustained squeeze and never releases the pressure for comfort. The result is a comedy that works because it refuses to let anyone in the room, or the seat, relax.