If you ever wanted to see American family dysfunction tiptoe right up to the precipice, peer over, consider taking a leap into delicious manic farce, and then, ever-so-polite, decide it’d rather just shuffle a little awkwardly for ninety minutes “Adulthood” is your movie.
Alex Winter, once the prince of pop-cultural chaos, now presides over a comedy with all the frantic, doomed energy of siblings trying to scrub blood out of the carpet before brunch. The premise is a dark-comedy layup: a forty-something brother and sister played by Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario, whose chemistry is the best argument for watching, stumble across a corpse in their parents’ basement, the evidence of the family’s ancestral rot literally bleeding through the floorboards. It’s the sort of scenario that should run on jet fuel and razor blades: full-tilt panic, shrieking lies, farcical coverups, and the ruinous undertow of repressed trauma bubbling up in every punchline.
Instead, “Adulthood” feels like a promising TV series accidentally inflated to feature-length, flattened by the director’s own weird caution. The tone is all over the map, caroming from crass sitcom zip to earnest little speeches about family and illness, wobbling between would-be screwball and “very special episode” honesty but never daring to commit. The script is commuter-rail dark: never fast or dangerous enough to be truly exhilarating, never biting enough to draw real blood, and worst of all never quite funny enough to sustain its own chosen chaos.
Scodelario, at least, leans into the absurdity, playing Megan as a woman always half-tempted to torch the entire family tree for insurance money, while Gad’s Noah is all hapless symptom, a modern schlemiel who can’t stop apologizing even as the bodies pile up. There are flashes (Anthony Carrigan’s Bodie, Billie Lourd’s perfectly zonked-out Grace) where the film briefly locates the live-wire deadpan of better, meaner comedies, a whiff of “Fargo,” or, dreaming high, “Arrested Development.” But these moments are islands in a sea of mediocrity, drowned by meandering plotting and a constant hedging of bets: every time the movie threatens to become unhinged, it tiptoes back to safety.
Nothing here is exactly dreadful. The actors are better than the script. There are laughs, well-timed, if fleeting. The cinematography is functional, the pacing a polite shamble punctuated by a few attempts at panic. But no one seems willing to risk true mania or genuine pain, so we get neither: just a weary, faintly sitcom-stained march toward a conclusion that, in a final jolt of energy, almost redeems the journey.
If “Adulthood” has a legacy, it’s as a case study in the hazards of negotiating tone in the post-writer’s-room era, where every streaming “dramedy” seems engineered for maximum inoffensiveness. The premise, covering up mommy and daddy’s crimes should play at the pitch of Greek tragedy filtered through Looney Tunes. Instead, we get the emotional equivalent of a hazy Sunday afternoon, amusing and entirely forgettable, with plot holes you could drive a hearse through and logic gaps that force you to squint, smile, and go on anyway, hoping the next punchline will distract you from the last dropped story thread.
Is “Adulthood” awful? Not at all. Mediocrity is its own kind of shame, there’s nothing here to loathe, just a lingering sense that you’ve seen sharper variations on this theme, and that these actors (each so game, so slyly knowing) deserve a script with more teeth, more recklessness, more courage. “Adulthood” is a grown-up who never learned to make a mess. Sometimes, you wish it would just throw its dinner at the wall.
