I watched this on the plane to Tokyo on the 11th of October, 2024, and I absolutely adored it. The characterisation was just off the scale, it blew everything else out of the water.
It’s the story of one evening. One couple invites another couple round for dinner, and that couple brings their mutual friend Jessica. They’re all university friends, now with careers, living in north London. Jessica is the only one without a partner and house, and she’s just written a bestselling book about her life and mistakes. She’s clearly the oddball of the bunch, the edgelord, at one point railing on about how boring everyone is, and how fake their lives are.
I’m sure this would have struck something a while back - I would have been like yeah you go girl, their lives are fake and meaningless. Now I’m not sure. My immediate reaction was that, Jessica, everyone has had these thoughts. Everyone is aware, on some level, that their lives are an attempt to organise and find meaning in what is fundamentally a collection of loose spheres hurtling around at frightening and frankly irresponsible speeds, to paraphrase someone(?). I don’t know whether this is the intended reaction, of sympathising with the “normal” couples, or whether it’s just because I’m more like them than I am like Jessica.
And then she kills herself in the garden.
The first couple is in dire straits, and they’re trying to sell the house to get some money. They have a buyer, but they are worried that he’ll pull out if he knows of the suicide, and so begins a comedic, dark, touching, and brutally sketched out farce, where they move Jessica back to her own flat, dealing with visits from the police, neighbours, partygoers, and revelations of infidelity.
There was a bit near the end that I felt was slightly weak, where the wife who has convinced/blackmailed everyone into helping has a change of heart once they’re back home after moving the body and decides to tell the police - there was no explanation for this, and although it was meant to be because of the sudden guilt she has, in comparison with the masterful conveyance of nuance in the rest of the film, it stuck out. Still, this was a tiny quibble.
It’s just an amazing watch, I was so thoroughly invested in the characters and what they’d do, and the portrayals of their histories, personalities and relationships was just chef’s kiss. It feels at times that the writers must have been stealing from their own lives, to have written something so accurate, so realistic, and yet funny without breaking the suspension of disbelief. The acting is also just phenomenal, it would have felt like a documentary if not for the polish.
I really want some … conflais? Conflit? What was the dessert he was making? I wanna see if there was a Google trends spike around the time the film came out.