‘The Overnight’ Review: A Raunchy Comedy With Smart Laughs

The Overnight, written and directed by Patrick Brice, throws two couples together in an adult playdate of sorts that gets wildly out of hand, exposing the most complicated of truths in the least self-serious manner possible.

‘The Overnight’ Review

Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling play Alex and Emily, who’ve relocated to Los Angeles from Seattle for Emily’s job. While getting their son settled is one thing, finding new friends for themselves presents its own, potentially more difficult and harrowing, challenges. When they bring their son to the local park, he makes fast friends with a boy around his age. When the boy’s father Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) introduces himself to Alex and Emily, it’s not long before he warmly invites them to a pizza night with his wife Charlotte (Judith Godrèche).

Emily and Alex head over to their family date night, dressed to impress. Alex, realizing Emily had brought a bottle of “two buck chuck,” panics about bringing the cheap wine. Peeling the label off, he tries to pass it off as a blend made by their faux vineyard-owning friends up in Napa. Despite the pretense and the initial caution of the pair, boundaries are soon dissolved, as sexual innuendo, once introduced, does nothing but accelerate in The Overnight.

As the protagonist of Netflix’s hit women’s prison comedy-drama Orange Is the New Black, Schilling has endeared herself to audiences despite her role as a somewhat unsympathetic character, largely thanks to her comic timing and vast arsenal of facial expressions – both of which serve her well in The Overnight. She more than holds her own alongside Schwartzman’s fantastically hyperbolic portrayal of a quintessential new-agey L.A. dad, Godréche’s sexually underwhelmed wife, and Scott’s mastery of the “straight man.”

The Overnight is something of a cinematic paradox, combining high-minded mumblecore with shameless gross-out humor (A gallery of butthole portraits, and comically large and comically small male genitalia filmed poignantly as Schwartzman and Scott dive into the pool during a late-night skinny dipping session stand out in particular) Brice blends navel lint-picking reality with an insane hyperreality, both of which make a viewer at once appreciative and distinctly uncomfortable with what’s being shown on screen.

Towards the end of the film, a scene shifts gears a handful of times before it becomes what can only be described as soft-core porn. Before, just before, it crosses into porn-porn, an interruption returns the film to its central idea – being parents, having pleasurable sex, and making friends is a tall order rife with awkwardness and complications.

The Overnight will hit theaters in limited release on June 19.