variety.com
18.02.2023 / 21:43
‘The Adults’ Review: Michael Cera Leads a Sad, Subdued Study of Estranged Siblings Coming Together and Falling Apart
Guy Lodge Film Critic Depending on the state of your own family network, the relationship between the trio of grown siblings at the center of “The Adults” may strike you as intensely, skin-crawlingly familiar or quite desolately alien. Either way, Dustin Guy Defa’s determinedly quiet family-reunion drama seeks to be discomfiting, gradually giving the viewer that hollow, lurching, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that either precedes a dreaded encounter or follows a disappointing one. That might not sounds like a good thing, but in the context of this small, expansively sad film, it is one: From that queasiness comes bristly tension, tautening and deepening what otherwise seems a low-key, low-stakes character study, and eventually a sweet, conciliatory sliver of hope too.