The Overnight

Patrick Brice's little movie The Overnight was one of the highlights of this year's Sundance Film Festival. It has become notorious in some circles, mostly for a quick poolside scene that occurs in the film's second act. If you've read anything about the movie, it's likely you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't I'd rather send you to Google than spoil the mild surprise for the potential audience.

That aside, it's a well-executed, small-scale film that was shot in only 12 days with a small cast. At times it feels naturalistic, but it occasionally veers into surreal territories. It is likely to discomfit and disturb some moviegoers (a critic friend posted on his Facebook page that he and his wife were "traumatized by this movie"), but the overall effect is surprisingly sweet and assuring.

It's about an evening a more or less conventional young couple spend with a less conventional young couple whom they might first receive as a sort of idealized (or, as they used to say in the '70s, more fully actualized) version of themselves.

Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling of Orange Is the New Black) are newly arrived in Los Angeles, having moved from Seattle. They have a young son, and they're nervous about his prospects for adapting to his new surroundings. They worry about his making new friends. They worry about making new friends themselves.

So it's convenient when they're approached by Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) at a neighborhood playground. Turns out he's the father of a toddler their son has befriended, and though he's dressed like a Mennonite hipster and presents as weirdly stiff -- he disapproves of gummy worms and says his son is on a strict vegan diet before allowing that he's joking, although it's not clear what about -- he seems genuinely interested in welcoming them to the neighborhood. He invites them to his house for pizza night.

Kurt's house, it turns out, is a grand Spanish-style mansion, and his wife, Charlotte (Judith Godreche), is a French "actress." They are sophisticated, clever and impeccably hospitable. They intimidate Alex. When he first sees their house, he decides the bottle of "Two Buck Chuck" they've brought as a gift is inadequate, so he rips off the label and presents it to Charlotte with a story. It's from their friends' vineyard up north, he says. "It's organic."

The boys give out rather quickly, but since "this is a French house" the adults are in charge of when the party breaks up. Their children are tucked away upstairs, nodding off as Kurt plays a delicate lullaby on his electric piano. And that's when the party really gets going.

I know next to nothing about writer-director Brice, only that he directed the well-regarded horror film Creep (which recently made its video-on-demand premiere) and that he's part of the orbit of brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, who served as producers on this film, which bears a certain tonal similarity to the brothers' HBO series Togetherness (which is filmed in the same east LA neighborhood).

As the night goes along, bongs (and things that rhyme with bongs) come out, and the two couples move on from wine to whiskey. Things spin more or less out of control, and a tension that most married couples can appreciate slowly develops. Do Kurt and Charlotte have a hidden agenda or is this just the way dinner parties are in California?

While the jokes are occasionally a little too broad -- Kurt's paintings are a pretty flat joke -- the real surprise here is how effectively affecting the few deadly serious scenes here are. Anyone who has been married for any length of time will likely appreciate the way Brice teases out the social anxiety inherent in this sort of couples' evening. Are we really unpardonably uncool if we don't smoke their dope and skinny-dip?

MovieStyle on 07/03/2015