104 min | R | August 19, 2022 | IFC Films
Amber wins a trip to an exclusive manager training program at her company’s Italian villa. She expects romance and wine and a story that makes sense. The villa has other plans.
Amber works the office of a struggling Italian restaurant chain in Bakersfield. She wins a spot in an exclusive manager training program at the company’s villa in Italy. She imagines wine, romance, and the owner falling for her. What she gets is a corporate retreat run by people who do not see her as a person. Jeff Baena and Alison Brie build the film as a bait and switch. It sells itself as a rom-com and keeps yanking the rug toward something darker and stranger.
Brie plays Amber as a woman desperate to believe the fantasy the company is selling her. She keeps smiling past the warning signs. Aubrey Plaza plays Kat, the owner’s assistant, with a flat affect that reads as either seduction or menace depending on the scene. Plaza never tips her hand. Alessandro Nivola plays Nick, the owner, as a man whose charm is a sales technique he cannot turn off. Fred Armisen and Tim Heidecker play fellow trainees who treat the absurd setup as normal, which makes the absurdity worse.
Baena directs from a script he co-wrote with Brie. He stages the villa as a place that should be beautiful and shoots it as a place where something is off. The framing keeps the trainees boxed into tight group shots that turn the program into a herd. The film refuses to settle into one genre and the editing mirrors that refusal. Scenes cut away before they resolve, which leaves the audience as disoriented as Amber. That choice is the whole point and the whole problem.
The film commits to its tonal whiplash without committing to a destination. It mocks the corporate fantasy and the rom-com fantasy in the same breath. Amber wants a story to make sense and the movie denies her one. That denial is honest and it is also frustrating. Spin Me Round has a sharp idea about the lies women are sold and not enough plot to hang it on.