THE PARENTING - Mark Reviews Movies

The Parenting, Max

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2025

The Parenting is a horror comedy that leans heavily into comedy, from its sitcom-like premise to the surprisingly flippant way the characters react to one of their own being possessed by a demonic entity. That means Kent Sublette's screenplay doesn't exactly find a way to make these elements gel, but the cast, which has some unexpected heavy hitters among its members, play the jokes with enough aplomb that the basic inconsistency of the story almost doesn't matter.

Plus, it's not as if Sublette and director Craig Johnson try to trick us into thinking the material is intended to be anything other than a joke machine. Even the standard prologue, which introduces the notion of this haunted and remote house by killing off some of its previous inhabitants, is more amusing than frightening.

In it, an irritated mother (played by Kate Avallone) just wants to watch the final episode of a popular TV comedy in 1983, but her two teenaged kids (played by John Hawe and Chloe Sciore) interrupt her directly or by way of the girl locking herself in her room. Quickly, all of them, it seems, are dispatched by a dark figure with glowing eyes and a clawed hand.

In the present day, the isolated house is now a rental, and happy couple Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) have booked it for a weekend. The plan is for each man to meet the other's parents, while also introducing the two pairs of parents to each other.

That would be nerve-wracking enough without Brenda (Parker Posey), the house's owner, behaving and generally being strange upon their arrival. She wants to know a lot about the situation for the weekend, makes an odd comment about the fact that Rohan and Josh are gay, and claims to be using a tree branch to measure some kind of utility line that will be going into the woods. In terms of preparing us for eccentricity, there are few ambassadors who would be better than Posey to set the tone.

The main gag of the movie, perhaps, is that this situation is plenty awkward before the supernatural happenings even start, and when they do, it mostly exacerbates how uncomfortable the meeting-the-parents scenario already has been. Josh's father and mother, Frank (Brian Cox) and Sharon (Edie Falco), are quite the straitlaced and proper duo, especially Sharon, who seems to have judged Josh even before she meets him and particularly after she learns he's currently unemployed—to work on his songwriting ambitions—and he accidentally walks in on her when she's on the toilet.

Yes, the setup and early jokes do come across like an episode of a TV sitcom or a comedic sketch stretched to feature length, and that sense continues when we meet Josh's parents. They're Liddy (Lisa Kudrow), who insists her name is short for one that's nothing like it, and Cliff (Dean Norris), who jokes that his is like a rock a person falls from and dies, but the big thing is that this pair is nothing like Rohan's parents.

In lesser hands, the whole scenario might play as the cliché it is, but Cox, Falco, Kudrow, and Norris play their roles with a bit of a winking acknowledgement of the gimmick, as well as some underlying sincerity about being nervous themselves. Oh, there's also the stereotypically self-centered friend, named Sara (Vivian Bang), who shows up uninvited after unintentionally letting it slip to Josh that Rohan plans to propose before the weekend is finished. One might say the only thing missing is a pesky dog that makes the uptight parents uncomfortable and can tell something's wrong before the humans, and that's sort of accurate, if only because Sublette introduces four canines into the situation.

It's around this point, of course, that things in the house become even weirder. Whenever someone says the internet password aloud, something thumps somewhere in the building. At night, we witness each couple hearing a rhythmic pounding, with each one assuming one of the other pairs is having fun in bed, but there's someone—or something—else in the house. Eventually, Frank is possessed by some evil spirit, and everyone seems more confused than frightened by his changed voice, uncharacteristic insults, and tendency to project an unnatural amount of vomit.

The screenplay basically takes all or most of the stuff from a haunted-house story and a demonic-possession tale, only to recontextualize it as a familiar farce. It's never scary, even as ghosts start appearing and Frank's odd behavior starts to include levitation, but the filmmakers aren't going for that, anyway. This is a screwball comedy through and through, with some gruesome and grotesque bits thrown in for some earned and random shocks.

Johnson's control of the material's tone, in other words, is strong, if only because the director doesn't attempt to do more than generate laughs—apart from some sincere and sweet moments between the central couple and each man's respective parents. With that approach firmly established and mostly unwavering, the success of The Parenting really comes down to the overall worthiness of the jokes at hand. Some of them are quite funny, especially when the actors get to play with their archetypical characters. When it comes to the genre elements of that comedy, however, the hits are much fewer, because the movie is too broad to work as a horror satire or parody.

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