Couples Weekend Review – Alexandra Daddario and Josh Gad lead a spicy comedy of marital squabbles | film

TThe interesting premise in this arduous and lively relationship drama unfortunately leads nowhere; All we get is loud, tense dialogue and mugging performances in a movie that doesn’t manage to be funny or realistic.

Alexandra Daddario (from TV’s The White Lotus) is Debs, a book editor who dreams of becoming an author herself; Her best friend from college is Mitch (Josh Gad), a lanky guy climbing the ladder in investment banking, perhaps harboring feelings for Debs that he can never acknowledge. They go to a cozy and picturesque woodland cabin to spend New Year’s with their partners; Debs is with the brilliant nature photographer Josh (Daved Diggs) and Mitch is with Melanie (Ashley Park), the uptight author of a best-selling cookbook called Emotional Eating (good title, actually).

The four are, in their different ways, nervously preoccupied with their professional standing, and Mitch in particular believes that Melanie is fundamentally out of his league and that he’s lucky. But when they returned from a hike one morning through the snow-covered landscape, Debs and Mitch looked through the cabin window and saw Josh and Melanie having sex. Debs desperately intends to storm in and confront them, but a whiny, weak-willed Mitch thinks they should wait – ostensibly to process the information, but actually because he doesn’t want to blow up his life and clearly believes that with a little effort he (and Debs) can deny the whole thing.

This approach can’t last long and results in a great deal of labored, uninteresting screaming and wailing, though the subsequent moment of breakthrough honesty, fueled by the discovery of a stash of moonshine in the cabin, is at least marginally comforting. It’s perhaps a shame that this film arrives in the UK at the same moment as Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, which shows how a spicy couple comedy can really work. This film abandons its promising initial premise and there is no redeeming insight or enjoyment.