Emma Seligman’s feature debut is an OK film with various highs-and-lows in its plot, presentation, and characters but, all in all, it still serves as a curious and fairly entertaining film.

This irregularity is best exemplified by its three distinctive storylines. Its main one concerning Danielle (played by Rachel Sennott) encountering her sugar daddy in a shiva is in fact most probably the weakest one, as there seems to be a certain lack of chemistry between the three main characters involved in it. Sennott is for sure good but her interactions with Danny Deferrari and Dianna Agron (Max and Kim respectively), and the interactions among those two themselves, are by far the least engaging ones. Next to that, we have the relationship between Danielle and Maya (Molly Gordon), which is definitely enjoyable and actually proves that maybe an increased focus on this story, giving as more details about it, compared to the previously mentioned could have actually improved the overall picture. And finally, we encounter the relation between Danielle and the surroundings, people attending to the shiva and more specifically towards her father and mother. It is in this last aspect where the movie excels, the multiplicity of various picturesque characters, the cliché of the family and people only wondering and discussing about other people’s life, focusing and debating on their academic, professional and love success, make the sequences in which this is the main focus, by far, the most entertaining and fun ones.

All these come together in one perfect sequence in which we start with Danielle and Maya arguing and this evolve to Danielle facing her own family and lover and his wife, becoming excellent thanks to the focusing and sound effects used during the scene which make us feel completely the same way as Danielle might be feeling during all that time, a mixture of sickness, angriness, frustration and claustrophobia.

In the acting department, it is pretty clear by what it has been said analysing each thread, which people give the best performances as it links quite perfectly with the story being good or not. Above anyone else we have the cast of extras and Fred Melamed and Polly Draper (who play Danielle’s parents), the small and background talk of the extras and Melamed and Draper relation are by far the highlight of the movie. After those, both Sennott and Gordon provide good performances. And last, as it has been said, Deferrari and Agron do not deliver at all, neither on their own, or between them, or towards the rest of characters, they never seem to be comfortable with their part, even the baby does it better than them.

In conclusion, we can interpret this film as quite uneven, maybe too many things are intended to be presented in such a short time span, but that does not make it a bad movie at all. After all, it is a debut and actually a good one, in which Seligman shows great promise and through which they will for sure further polish their style in their way to finding their own voice and full independence in this medium.