Homewrecker

Sometimes cinema is built on coincidence. Like, for example, at Fantastic Fest last year there were two films that used karaoke versions of Lisa Loeb's "Stay" for dramatic effect. One was the innovative relationship creature feature After Midnight, which turned the melancholic classic into a significant emotional revelation. In flat cringe comedy Homewrecker, it's a gag that just feels like it will never end.

Imagine a clunky comedy riff on Single White Female, as interior designer Michelle (Essoe, Starry Eyes, Doctor Sleep) gets entangled one afternoon with Linda (Chong), a middle-aged woman who she meets at the gym. Linda convinces her to come over to her house to hang out, and that's when her true colors come out, as she refused to let her new young play pal leave, and gets increasingly wild-eyed and crazy.

Moreover, incoherent and weirdly mean. Linda (if the script had been written a year later, you just know she would have been called Karen) is desperately hanging on to her youth, and after bludgeoning Michelle with a nearby ornament she tries to turn her abduction into a bizarro slumber party. She breaks out her 1980s teen romance movies, wants to gossip about boyzzz, and chides Michelle for checking her phone and being constantly on the Instagrams. It's hard to say exactly where all the blame lies, but there's something surprisingly ugly at play in the depiction of middle-aged women as "past it and crazy." That may not be the intention of Chong, Essoe, and director Gayne, but that's where this ends up.

The other devastating problem in this messy black comedy is simple: Chong and Essoe just don't gel. Where there should be comedic friction and dramatic tension in this opposites-do-not-attract story, they just seem to be in different films. Essoe adds more depth to Michelle, while Chong deliberately overblows Linda into a perpetual adolescent, trapped somewhere in a perpetual Tim & Eric remix of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." She's never a fully-formed sympathetic character, making any attempts at inducing empathy just feel queasy. Their differences are supposed to be a source of awkward laughter, but it's just awkward. The final 50 minutes of this dragging 76-minute sleep-over feel like a self-indulgent and sporadically cartoonishly violent therapy session, as Michelle switches from baring her soul to her captor over a game of Party Hunks to running around the house, looking for a way out. There's a literal face-plant into a French window joke, a surprisingly large number of prat falls, and a lot of undiagnosed concussions for Michelle – all of which takes forever.

The sloth-like pacing isn't helped by Built to Spill guitarist Doug Martsch's distorted 50's pop soundtrack. The sound, seemingly designed to evoke both Linda's childishness and her clear mental instability, further drags the film down to a treacly slog. Honestly, you'll feel as trapped in Linda's not-so-funhouse as Michelle. At least you'll have an easier time getting out.

Homewrecker is on VOD now.