Mark Reviews Movies: SPINSTER

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2020

Apart from being cynical and sarcastic, there isn't much to the main character of Spinster. It doesn't help that everything more or less falls into place for her, meaning that there's never really a sense of growth for the character.

Near the start of director Andrea Dorfman's movie, for example, Gaby (Chelsea Peretti) is dumped by a guy she had been dating. This should seem terrible (The dumping occurs on her 39th birthday), but Gaby basically wore the guy down, living with him despite his protests. Now, he's so tired of her hanging around for no reason that the guy just leaves and gives her his apartment.

Peretti's performance here is so removed from any kind of emotion that we might wonder if this was some kind of scheme on Gaby's part. The character definitely doesn't seem to care about much of anything. She runs a catering business, where she insults a potential customer for having an admittedly naïve view on love. She starts dating again, but Dorfman and screenwriter Jennifer Deyell present it as a montage of her being rude to a series of unseen guys.

We never quite know what the character wants. Because of Peretti's consistently dismissive tone, we're never really sure if Gaby is ever sincere when she actually says what she wants.

The basic premise is that Gaby is indecisive about whether she wants love, marriage, and/or kids or some other life goal that she has yet to realize. To give the filmmakers credit, once Gaby decides to open a restaurant (with a gift of tens of thousands of dollars given to her by her father, because, again, everything ends up coming easy to the character), the story comes into some kind of focus (They tease us with the possibility that Gaby meets the right guy, but the filmmakers stick to their purpose—after unnecessarily extended scenes showing the characters instantly connecting).

It's far too little, though, after going through an aimless story with listless momentum, flat jokes, conventional and bland supporting characters, and challenges that never really becomes much of an obstacle. Spinster, though, is mostly undone by its central character, whose uncertainty feels more like a gimmick than anything authentic (One scene attempts some armchair psychology about her parents), and performance, which seems to care so little about any of this that our feelings are mutual.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products