November 2, 2026 – One of the reasons I decided to watch this is because I thought it was a comedy. While it does have its comedic moments, it is really a heavy drama about a marriage on the rocks.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, who also stars as one of the four characters in this movie, stay-at-home mom Angela, wife of music teacher Joe (Seth Rogan of “Good Fortune”). Joe arrives home from work complaining of back pain and discovers Angela has invited the people from the apartment upstairs to dinner. Angela lies and tells Joe that she informed him of the invite several days ago.

Joe and Angela then get into a heated argument, which the upstairs neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton of “A Complete Unknown”) and Piña (Penélope Cruz of “The Bride!”) can hear as they approach the door. Embarrassed, Joe and Angela invite Hawk and Piña in anyway. They begin a strange and awkward conversation that becomes even stranger as the evening goes on.

Layers of pretense are stripped away as the conversation continues and hidden grievances that have been festering for years slowly come to the surface. Joe is especially sensitive about his past as a musician in a band, and his unhappiness with his current job teaching music at a second-rate college. Angela's repressed sexual desires are uncovered as well by Piña, who is a therapist.

One of the reasons that Joe wanted to talk to his upstairs neighbors was to ask about very loud sex noises coming from their apartment, including growling noises and orgasmic yelling. Angela doesn't want Joe to bring up that subject, and keeps interrupting him when he tries to. Eventually, the subject is brought up by Hawk and Piña themselves. From there, the conversation takes another strange turn.

The conversation turns into an extremely personal discussion about group sex and anal sex, which Joe and Angela are very interested in. Joe and Angela are eventually invited to join in, even though Piña thinks they are not ready for such sexual encounters, and she's right. Things go spectacularly wrong. Joe and Angela are forced to confront their inner demons, but where that will lead them into the future is unknown.

This movie is very talky and it looks like a stage play that almost entirely takes place in one apartment. It seems even longer than its running time of 107 minutes, and I kept checking the time to see how much longer it was going to run. The acting is very good. I was impressed with Penélope Cruz's accent. It seems to me her Spanish accent used to be more pronounced (she does speak some Spanish in this movie) but I found her speech easy to understand here.

This movie reminded me of some other movies I've seen, like “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969) “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) and “Marriage Story” (2019) that explore similar themes. I wasn't really in the mood for this kind of heavy drama, but even so, it is a good movie. It rates a B.

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