Mark Reviews Movies: HAPPILY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 18, 2021

After 14 years of marriage, Tom (Joel McHale) and Janet (Kerry Bishé) have the sex life of a newly-dating young couple, and it bugs the hell out of their friends. That's the initial premise of writer/director BenDavid Grabinski's debut feature Happily, which starts as a fairly funny comedy, grows increasingly weirder, and gradually reveals that it doesn't have much to say outside its central mystery.

Romantic relationships and friendships, obviously, are at the core of this story. We meet Tom and Janet, who lock eyes at a party like they're meeting each other for the first time and proceed to have some energetic sex in the bathroom. This is the norm, according to the couple's married pals Karen (Natalie Zea) and Val (Paul Scheer), and perhaps even worse, the jaunt to the bathroom is just foreplay for what's inevitably to come when Tom and Janet return home. Despite the friends' poo-pooing, the movie does, at least, treat sex with a bit of fun, which seems like an outlier as of late.

The couple's other friends, apparently, have had enough with Tom and Janet's sexual regularity. A group of them are scheduled for a couples' getaway at a rented mansion. At a dinner out (Tom and Janet are late, of course, because they needed to have some non-makeup sex after a non-existent fight, and the couple's apparent harmony is another thorn in the side of other people), Karen and Val inform the two that the group has put it to a vote. Tom and Janet are dis-invited from the vacation. Even with the little lecture about how odd their relationship seems, Tom and Janet can't keep their hands off each other while being scolded for such behavior.

There are a couple of early hints that everything might not be what seems in this relationship. First, they do kind of have a fight, when Tom asks Janet to make him an omelet while he sits playing video games in the morning. There's this quiet response from Janet, standing in the kitchen and looking as if she's trying to work up the effort to have a negative emotional response to this request. It never arrives, but the enigma of that look, portrayed so hauntingly by Bishé, is fascinating.

The other hint is a bit more direct. After the dinner where the couple is basically disowned by their friends, a mystery man, known only as Goodman (Stephen Root), arrives at their door. He suggests that Tom and Janet suffer from some kind of chemical imbalance or evolutionary quirk, eliminating their instinctual concept of diminishing returns. Isn't it odd they have so much sex? Does it make sense that they never argue? How is ot possible that, when do have even the slightest of fights, they're capable of immediately and genuinely forgiving each other?

Goodman offers a solution in the form of a drug. Janet whacks him in the head with a decoration, killing the stranger. The two bury the body in the woods and pack to leave town. That's when they get the call: They have been re-invited to the getaway.

The rest of the story, taking place within the confines of the mansion, features a couple of mysteries, namely if the mysterious stranger was a prank, and gradually becomes more and more surreal. In addition to the aforementioned ones, there are three other couples at the mansion: Patricia (Natalie Morales) and Don (Jon Daly), Carla (Shannon Woodward) and Maude (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), and Richard (Breckin Meyer) and Gretel (Charlyne Yi).

Tom and Janet suspect any of them could have set up the joke, resulting in the killing of the man. They all drink and party, and after a lot of suspicions and accusations and resentments are suggested, everyone finds himself or herself in a position of having to reveal some darker secret.

Grabinski's screenplay is, essentially, a lot of setup, featuring some amusing bits revolving around the dynamics of these characters, offering some atmospheric paranoia, and mostly building up toward the climactic scene in which everyone has to explain what has happened and what they have done over and before the weekend. The mood here is intriguing, and there are downright surreal touches, from Janet's dreams of isolation to her impossibly seeing a familiar face.

That works to a certain extent, although it always feels as if Grabinski is keeping the truth of these character, this situation, and his intentions at a distance. The real meat of this story and these characters don't arrive until that climactic scene, and by the time all has been revealed, the movie has no time or concern to offer any explanation or resolution to anything, except through one moment of sudden violence and a few empty platitudes.

It simply feels as if there's a lot more here, beneath the surface and kept there in order to maintain the movie's air of mystery and the riddle of the main couple's happiness. We don't need answers to any of these things, but Happily takes a bit too long to even start asking the pertinent questions.

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