Adulthood, directed by Alex Winter and starring Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario, is a film that hilariously oscillates between suburban family crisis and sheer chaos. Winter refuses the audience any comforts of moral clarity; instead, he takes you into the day-to-day life of two siblings who have royally fucked up and their misguided steps to make it right.
When Noah (Gad) and his sister Megan (Scodelario) find their mother hospitalized, the two are brought back to their childhood home to face the life they quietly left behind. As they are cleaning out the basement, they find a dead body hidden behind the water-soaked walls. The body in question belongs to their long-time deceased neighbour, who was assumed murdered by her now permanently-confused husband. Instead of calling the police because they believe they have too much to lose, they try to hide the body, but things don’t go as planned, and they quickly become the target for blackmail by their mother’s former caregiver, played by Billie Lourd.
What the film does well is balance the tone of its blended genres, one part tragicomedy, the other crime drama. The pacing, however, was slow, which made it hard for me to appreciate the funny bursts of violence and dark humour. Gad excels as the failed Hollywood writer pretending to be capable of handling the problems he’s created for himself. No one, not even his sister, is buying his performance as a character in one of his shitty scripts, but they play along as he slowly descends into madness.
There were moments that I laughed and felt uneasy in all the right ways but mostly I don’t feel the script gave room for connection to these troubled characters who are equally awful people. Because it’s an immersion of genre, although entertaining, I am not clear with how I was meant to feel or side with. I left the film feeling unsatisfied and a bit confused about the choices of the director and writer.
Adulthood is playing at TIFF ’25. For more information, click here.
