Notes
My quick rating - 5.4/10. Adulthood sets itself up with a potentially fun premise with two adult siblings discovering a corpse hidden in their childhood home and immediately deciding the responsible thing to do is—of course—dump it in a lake. Calling the police? Don’t be ridiculous. Josh Gad plays Noah, a man whose every line sounds like it was workshopped in a panic room, and Kaya Scodelario steps in as Meg, whose moral compass points mostly toward self-preservation. The two have the chemistry of people who haven't spoken since their last shared therapist, yet they somehow agree on the worst possible course of action at every turn.
The movie opens with promise, but the script—courtesy of Michael M.B. Galvin—often feels like it was written on a dare to see how far characters can push stupidity before losing all audience sympathy. Spoiler: it doesn't take long. The dialogue is frequently painful, the kind of stupid that isn't clever enough to be satire and not grounded enough to be believable. If anyone thought I’d muster empathy for these two, they were wildly optimistic. Their decision-making is so baffling that when things begin to spiral, it feels less like tragedy or dark comedy and more like karmic housekeeping.
Naturally, their brilliant lake-dumping plan goes exactly as it should: poorly and with escalating consequences. Enter Bodie, played by Anthony Carrigan, who is easily the standout and seems to be the only one truly having fun. He’s brought in as the “scary criminal guy,” specifically to intimidate a nurse (Billie Lourd) who has the audacity to question their nonsense. Carrigan walks away with every scene he’s in, delivering the kind of deadpan menace the movie desperately needed more of. Lourd holds her own, though she spends most of her time reacting to idiocy with increasing disbelief, a feeling I deeply related to.
The tonal shift in the back half is welcome, as the film finally stops pretending it's a quirky sibling caper and embraces darker territory. Bodies stack higher than I anticipated, which at least gives the chaos some bite. Director Alex Winter clearly wanted to flirt with full-on pitch-black comedy, and for a while it seems like he's gearing up to commit. Unfortunately, the ending eases off the gas just when it should slam the accelerator through the floor. It’s not timid, exactly, but it hesitates, like it suddenly remembered it might still want a streaming audience.
What keeps the movie watchable is the cast chemistry, even when the script sinks them. Gad never earns an ounce of sympathy; his character is annoying enough that I rooted for the lake to claim him. Scodelario fares better, and Meg becomes marginally tolerable as things snowball, though I’d never follow her lead in a crisis. The jokes often strain for effect, and you can feel the writers begging for laughs that don’t quite land.
In the end, Adulthood is a passable dark comedy with a stronger second half and a sense of humor that tries way too hard. It’s mildly entertaining, occasionally sharp, but ultimately a one-and-done watch. The title may be Adulthood, but these characters are graduates of the Bad Decisions Academy with honors—and not in a way that makes me root for a sequel.
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