Does two movies make a trend? Does it have to be three? For Worse is the second movie of SXSW 2025 that focuses on a divorced woman in her 50s trying to make sense of the culture that now surrounds her. Hilarity does in fact ensue and in a different tone and timbre from its secret sharer, Fantasy Life.
While Fantasy Life was a New York story written and directed by a millennial, For Worse – written and directed by and starring Amy Landecker (the author insert role in streaming series Transparent) – is unabashedly Los Angeles-based (just look at that light!) and, well, what is the cutoff for Gen Z these days?
Lauren is 50, sober, freshly divorced from Chase (a perfect Paul Adelstein), and getting used to his new partner, Sara (who is young enough to have a job as an influencer). With the encouragement of her Smart Aleck Best Pal named Julie (Missi Pyle, also tremendous), she takes an acting class and has a thing with a much younger actor named Sean (Nico Hiraga, clearly a guy who has never met a shirt he felt compelled to button).
Is this essentially the plot of a mid-budget romantic comedy from a division of Sony? Absolutely. Does it look and move like an indie? Also yes, which is essential to its charm. It’s also striking to realize how completely the rom-com has vanished from the scene as a genre at all, let alone a tentpole. (Talk about something Gen X remembers well and Gen Z knows nothing about.)
When Lauren gets mildly out of control at a wedding, a fellow divorcee named Dave (Bradley Whitford, Landecker’s IRL husband) comes to her rescue. Again, rom-com to the letter, a genre that Landecker has a talent for directing and acting – she’s far funnier than her IMDB page indicates.
If you’re noticing a lot of folks from Transparent, you’re not wrong. For Worse also feels like a bid for Landecker to move away from her most famous part, where she played a woman having a life-altering crisis in her sexuality, gender identity, and sense of self. Lauren’s stakes feel far smaller, as they should.
All of the characters are carefully titrated to seem like actual human beings. Sean isn’t a bad guy at all. Lauren’s character will have 12-steppers arguing about if she reset her day count, and Dave is believably cranky (after The West Wing’s allegedly Jewish Josh Lyman became a folk hero, folks forgot Whitford built his career playing WASP jackasses and is quite good at it).
Landecker knows exactly how good her friends are and lets them extend in scenes that clearly owe to improvisation. Also present: Simon Helberg, Ken Marino and, yes, Transparent sib Gaby Hoffman as an acting teacher who takes the subject very seriously indeed. A rock-solid, often very funny debut.
Screens again Wednesday, March 12 and Saturday, March 15.
For Worse
Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.