If I were to look really deep at The Overnight I think I would both find not a whole lot there and yet a lot there at the same time. This might not make much sense, but Patrick Brice has a fairly thin narrative at heart - a couple gets invited over for dinner and drinks and to uh hang out at a new friendly couple's place (they've just moved to California so there's some culture clash at the least) and hi-jinks ensue of course but in the 'lewd' sense) - and yet it's also a movie about masculinity and what it means to have power over someone in sexual situations and in bed in general.
The Adam Scott character Alex, as the prime example, is a little concerned about the size of his you-know-what, and it's not in a way of making a running joke about it (Howard Stern used to do that a lot), but in a terrified/petrified sort of way that gets emphasized, so to speak, when Schwartzman's character Kurt shows his as there's a skinny dipping scene (it's basically like a Dirk Diggler moment). How does he get the courage to show it? Well, somehow, through some uh male encouragement he does, and then that becomes a thing not so much for Alex but for Emily (Taylor Schilling), like, what is he trying to prove here? What's going to happen from here, such as a swinging thing?
There's some explicit territory here, but the key thing is that it's a sex comedy and that a lot of the sex is messy and awkward and because of that it's funnier. Kurt's wife (a French actress I'm not familiar with but is quite good here, Godreche) does the 'dabbling' in massages, and of course when she finally shows what she does to Emily it's the naughty kind. This is somewhat predictable, but it's still revealed and shot in a way that is meant to be genuinely shocking for Emily, and for us as well. By this point in the movie it feels like there shouldn't be much else to shock us but there is more, and I wouldn't want to reveal it even in a spoilery-review.
Suffice it to say the movie is funny, and at times it's very funny. It may be sort of soft targets - the hipster elite in California where the guy is an 'artist' who draws, yes, assholes, literally, and there's the way that Schwartzman plays this guy that is kind of like what might've happened to one of his Wes Anderson characters (i.e. Max in Rushmore) if he somehow got to California and specialty internet porn and married a French woman. So it's both awkward and in its way quirky, but also dark, which is what I might've responded to the most. The fact that the movie isn't afraid to go 'there' or wherever the hell the next 'there' might be is exciting and unpredictable. If nothing else he's the reason to see the movie, but across the board the four main actors are excellent (Scott is filling a role it feels like he's played before in stuff like Friends with Kids, the nice guy with issues, but he can pull it off, and Schilling is... Schilling, Piper from OitNB).
It functions more like an expanded short film, it has a closer scope and feel to that, but the characters were well drawn out, it knows how to pace itself so there's some space in-between the comedy to get to know these people and develop relationships over one night, and the climax is just about the uproariously funny thing you'll see in any movie, spot-perfect-awesome timing that is also a callback to something earlier in the film. It's an engaging, funny movie about sexual politics, and though it seems a little thin on the surface (the Duplass brothers produced and it's really a film they'd make, though it's directed by someone else), it's got a lot to say while seeming like it's not saying much, if that makes sense.
The Adam Scott character Alex, as the prime example, is a little concerned about the size of his you-know-what, and it's not in a way of making a running joke about it (Howard Stern used to do that a lot), but in a terrified/petrified sort of way that gets emphasized, so to speak, when Schwartzman's character Kurt shows his as there's a skinny dipping scene (it's basically like a Dirk Diggler moment). How does he get the courage to show it? Well, somehow, through some uh male encouragement he does, and then that becomes a thing not so much for Alex but for Emily (Taylor Schilling), like, what is he trying to prove here? What's going to happen from here, such as a swinging thing?
There's some explicit territory here, but the key thing is that it's a sex comedy and that a lot of the sex is messy and awkward and because of that it's funnier. Kurt's wife (a French actress I'm not familiar with but is quite good here, Godreche) does the 'dabbling' in massages, and of course when she finally shows what she does to Emily it's the naughty kind. This is somewhat predictable, but it's still revealed and shot in a way that is meant to be genuinely shocking for Emily, and for us as well. By this point in the movie it feels like there shouldn't be much else to shock us but there is more, and I wouldn't want to reveal it even in a spoilery-review.
Suffice it to say the movie is funny, and at times it's very funny. It may be sort of soft targets - the hipster elite in California where the guy is an 'artist' who draws, yes, assholes, literally, and there's the way that Schwartzman plays this guy that is kind of like what might've happened to one of his Wes Anderson characters (i.e. Max in Rushmore) if he somehow got to California and specialty internet porn and married a French woman. So it's both awkward and in its way quirky, but also dark, which is what I might've responded to the most. The fact that the movie isn't afraid to go 'there' or wherever the hell the next 'there' might be is exciting and unpredictable. If nothing else he's the reason to see the movie, but across the board the four main actors are excellent (Scott is filling a role it feels like he's played before in stuff like Friends with Kids, the nice guy with issues, but he can pull it off, and Schilling is... Schilling, Piper from OitNB).
It functions more like an expanded short film, it has a closer scope and feel to that, but the characters were well drawn out, it knows how to pace itself so there's some space in-between the comedy to get to know these people and develop relationships over one night, and the climax is just about the uproariously funny thing you'll see in any movie, spot-perfect-awesome timing that is also a callback to something earlier in the film. It's an engaging, funny movie about sexual politics, and though it seems a little thin on the surface (the Duplass brothers produced and it's really a film they'd make, though it's directed by someone else), it's got a lot to say while seeming like it's not saying much, if that makes sense.