Couples Weekend, 2025.
Written and Directed by Nora Kirkpatrick.
Starring Alexandra Daddario, Daveed Diggs, Josh Gad, Ashley Park, and Kevin Pollak.
SYNOPSIS:
A couples’ weekend in the winter wilderness is turned upside-down by a shocking betrayal.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Couples Weekend is a rather generic title, and should never had got past the first draft. Yet it’s sadly fitting with the final product, which reads more like an outline than an actual, finished production ready for wide release. The film follows two married couples, Mitch and Melanie, (Josh Gad and Ashley Park), and Debs and Josh, (Alexandra Daddario and Daveed Diggs), who head off for the holidays to a remote snowy mountain lodge, whose location is never specified. This isn’t an issue in itself, but it’s an early sign of the movie’s lack of specificity, which becomes increasingly apparent as the plot flops open.
The two couples, united by Debs and Mitch’s fifteen-year friendship, hope to get away to reconnect with the outdoors, each other, and escape the stresses of their lives. The nature of these stresses remains vague – Debs and Melanie are both writers, yet we never get much sense of their work or what it means to them. Debs’ bestselling novel, supposedly an emotional tour de force, is never given a title, and when Melanie confesses how deeply it affected her, she refers to the lead character as “the lead character”.
Mitch works in business, or finance, or something; as Josh tells him during a tense wood-chopping scene, “I don’t… know what you do, man.” Neither do we. Josh is a nature photographer, though we never see him in action, and his credibility comes under some suspicion. The film attempts to mine some depth through each character’s profession, but their careers are too ill-defined, and we don’t see them engage with their work in any meaningful way.
On the first morning of the trip, Mitch and Debs head out on a snowy hike, but decide to head back early after a close call with a falling fir tree. This leads to them witnessing Josh and Melanie having sex, standing up, in front of an open window. They must’ve been pretty sure their spouses wouldn’t be back early. Or have a direct view from the mountain.
Distraught, Debs tries to go in for an instant confrontation, but Mitch holds her back, literally, and convinces her that they should hold off. For a while, it seems the film is heading in a promising direction, drawing tension and comedy from Josh and Melanie’s efforts to conceal their adulterous blunder, while Debs and Mitch try to hide their knowledge, all brewing towards an inevitable confrontation. Yet this happens less than fifteen minutes later, as Melanie, unable to bear the tension, blurts out the truth.
It’s here that writer/director Nora Kirkpatrick loses any sense of direction or momentum, as once the truth is out, any potential tension, intrigue or awkward comedy flies out the window, into the raging blizzard outside. The storm is a simple but effective device for keeping the characters trapped in the lodge together, but there’s little for them to do, other than yell, sulk, cry, and drink.
There’s not much humour to be found, and we don’t know the characters or their relationships well enough to feel the tragedy of this betrayal and its fallout; the result is a grim assault on the senses. Josh Gad does his best to squeeze some comedy out of the material, wringing his lines dry by drawing them out as slowly as possible. I think they were dry to begin with.
Kirkpatrick attempts to inject some life into the stagnant plot when Mitch discovers a stash of old moonshine hidden in the boiler room. Once he starts glugging it down, the film begins to wake up, bringing a kind of manic energy to Josh Gad’s performance, and eventually the whole cast as they pass the bottle around. But the movie can’t regain what it has lost in dramatic tension.
Instead, it devolves into a four-way sequence of debates and squabbles over morality, faithfulness and fate, between characters too shallow to reveal anything profound about these concepts. The film also finds itself at odds with its own morality – during a dispute between Josh and Melanie as to who kissed who, Josh attests; “You cannot just kiss a woman in this day and age”, yet shortly before this, when Mitch drunkenly confesses his latent feelings to his long-time bestie Debs, he does just that. Later, Josh confesses that he did indeed kiss Melanie, and Debs kisses Mitch back.
Eventually, the movie fizzles out, struggling to resolve its ideas, or draw a satisfying conclusion from its thin plot and characters. The first act promises a cringe-inducing black comedy, but throws out this interesting angle in favour of a messy, directionless and overly talky second and third act. Writer/director Nora Kirkpatrick grasps for mature themes about aging, relationships, and the human condition, but doesn’t develop her characters deeply enough to explore these ideas beyond surface-level dialogue.
Despite this, the cast give solid performances all-round, with Alexandra Daddario pulling her emotional and comedic weight particularly well, keeping things watchable. Ultimately, Kirkpatrick’s generalist approach might have worked for a more heightened, satirical version of this story, but it fails to support what’s supposed to be an intimate character and relationship drama.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Dan Carville
