There are only so many ways to hide a body, and there are only so many ways a movie as “Adult age“It turns out. Alex Winter’s entertaining but easy film Is a crazy rush about trauma between the generations and abuse cycles, although it is quite obvious from a given advertising image. As crazy as the movie intends to be, there is never an unexpected moment. Thankfully, this turns out to be less problems than it should be.
“Adulthood” follows Noah and Megan Robles, two siblings whose mother has been left unable to speak after a stroke. As they look through the basement in their childhood home, they notice a leak in the water heater and a terrible smell. Their investigation leads them to the rotten body for their old neighbor Patty Metzger (a good name for a character whose moniker will hang over the rest of the film), which disappeared years ago. Instead of calling it into the police, they decide, to protect the family’s reputation and finances, to dump the body in a quarry. Of course, the cascade to bury the past only cascade for further safety damage and ethical compromise.
In the last 20 years of Black List Darlings and Edgar Wright Rip-offs, the American film industry, has established a new archetype of film filled with Quippy Anti heroes, Gory Allegories for domestic battle and character actors that rattle of reference humor. In recent years, this has seen this subcategory exchange its trend for a position as a legitimate niche market with the lower level of stupid genre programmers. The year 2025 is a movie like “Adult Age” -DVS. A Whedon-Esque moral game where one of the characters carries an Alamo Drafthouse shirt-not longer cool or remotely. It is the standard deviation for each movie to play the midnight section of a festival. But I like Midnight sectionAnd I thought the movie was a completely lovely way to spend 97 minutes.
Much of this depends on a single bearing creative decision, one that becomes wonderfully obvious only a few scenes in. Unlike similar stories, where characters often reflect in the concept of replicating their parents, Robles maniacally insisters that they follow their well -being or others in their parents at every cost of their well -being. It is their duty to protect their mother’s legacy. The drums over several oppuities to free themselves from the consequences of their own actions of a stubborn devotion to their own toxicity. This approach is much more fun than the alternative and gives much more room to explore questions about family responsibility and the difference between care and self -preservation.
Such thematic complications present themselves, however in a confusing order, with unreliable texture. Nearly half of the film focuses on the extortion effort from her mother’s nurse (Billie Lourd). Her motivations, because someone who opposes being dehumanized by those who pay her to do what she believes is a child’s duty of care, is a worthy inclusion, but her scenes feel like a slack waste of time in a story that requires a certain level of propulsion. Anthony Carrigans Bodie, the unpredictable cousin brought in by Noah to scare her, is similarly claimed disproportionately. He puts the hypocrisy in the siblings’ insistence on acting by any family obligation and not direct selfishness. But this might be better highlighted by the character played by the winter itself. As Patty’s vagrant son, he delivers a heartbreaking and immediately leading performance. Unfortunately, he has a total of about 180 seconds of ScreenTime, the perfect foil to the siblings’ relationship is bizarre.
The other performances are uneven, although I am not sure how much of it is the script and how much is the direction of winter. On one side is GAD, which performs shockingly well. Noah is a debt -eligible, Nerdy middle -aged person who feels completely emasculated by his inability to get a project from the ground. As someone who has never been swung by Gad’s special brand of disgusting chip humor, Noah’s depressive snark finds him in a much more comfortable register. He takes an unmatched caricature and turns it into a convincing normal guy, even in the midst of all the hijinx and blood casting. Scoledeno, however, is bad by a script that gives her lots of details but no depth. In addition to covering a murder or sex, Megan Obsessively monitors his diabetic son’s glucose levels and is stuck at the poor end of a multi -level marketing schedule. Scoledeno is visibly worried, but Megan’s motives are frustratingly uninterrupted until she finally explains herself in voice-over.
All this may be explained by the core errors in the “adult” construction: each bow is defined by IF and when someone chooses to strike out in violence, but said that violence is always irrational and incredibly dramatized. As always, Carrigan is a player artist. But Bodie, with his room full of swords and adult braces, is the type of crazy force that requires a clarity of vision and winter is not up to the task. The end is not a twist, but it makes refilling psychological information about the nature of sibling dynamics that would have worked endlessly if Galvn had found a way to seed these tensions in the past, or winter a way to dredge them through performance or misee-en-scene. Despite the condition, the film is without a clear genre. It’s not scary, it’s not exciting, I don’t even know if I would call it a comedy.
Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my time looking at “adulthood.” Whatever you call this kind of movie, I think it’s delightful. I think its snoring faux-nihilism is sweet and provides enough energy to the procedure for paper over its dramatic lurches. I like Iver like every idiosyncratic piece of set design and every minor twist is presented. I like to decline that someone on the screen is committing murder and then swearing, how you can tell a Rome-com heroine is about to travel when she wears a bundle of paper.
I like movies like “Adult Age.” There are plenty of better movies just like that. But there are many worse too. In addition, this one does not have a single annoying needle body. It must count for something!
Rating: c
“Adulthood” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking the US distribution
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