SUZE - Mark Reviews Movies

Suze, Tribeca Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 6, 2025

The surprise of Suze is how this sitcom-like premise results in a story so warm and compassionate about its characters. Co-writers/co-directors Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart understand them—their wants, their flaws, their untapped potential—and obviously care about them, too. We quickly come to do the same.

To be sure, the setup does feel like the pilot for a TV show, but it proves one should never judge a film solely by its gimmick. We meet Susan (Michaela Watkins), who has been through a lot starting about five years ago. After coming home one late night, she found her then-husband having sex with another woman in the backyard pool. The two divorced, of course, and Susan essentially became a single mother to the couple's daughter, while the girl's father moved on and married the other woman.

Five years later, the daughter, named Brooke (Sara Waisglass), is about to graduate from high school. Susan is under the impression that the daughter is going to a nearby college in their suburban Hamilton hometown, but on graduation day, the ex-husband Alan (Sandy Jobin-Bevans) drops the news that Brooke has decided to attend university in Montreal. It's either a long drive or a short flight between the two cities, but regardless of the means of the trip, that means Brooke is definitely moving out of the house, leaving Susan completely alone for the first time in a long time.

Watkins is a very funny actor, which means she's typically cast in supporting roles. She's also, though, quite subdued in her comedic approach, and Clark and Stewart have been wise enough to spot that quality and cast her in a role that is both quite amusing, as Susan struggles to find some meaning in a life on her own, and far deeper than just a joke. Like the other main character in the story, here's someone who has felt rejected and overlooked, put a lot of her emotions into her relationship with Brooke, and, with that essentially gone, feels lost as to where to go with or what could possibly come from her life.

That other character is Brooke's boyfriend Gage (Charlie Gillespie), a slightly older guy who hasn't graduated from high school yet and, based on his apparent inability to go to classes, probably won't anytime soon, either. Gage is a bit of a joke at the start, too, because we see him from Susan's perspective. In her mind, he's a loser, a young man with little to no prospects, and someone whom her daughter would be better off dumping as soon possible. It's the big things about Gage that bother Susan, but it's also the little ones, such as the way he keeps calling her "Suze," no matter how many times she tells Gage to stop. The guy really and sincerely loves Brooke, though. That much we can tell.

Before getting to the more specific details, the premise here has Gage move in with Susan. It's the sort of odd-couple matchup that's a standard for situational comedy, well before the term "odd couple" even became a common phrase. It is funny, obviously—the idea of this kind-of dim but well-meaning young man living under the same roof as an intelligent and skeptical woman who can't stand the guy's personality and slacker behavior.

In the minds of Clark and Stewart, the premise has the potential for more than that, though. Take the details of how Gage ends up living with Susan. Brooke breaks up with him, and soon after, she calls her mother, after a long stretch of ignoring Susan's repeated phone calls, and tells her that Gage attempted suicide.

Doing a favor for her daughter, Susan visits the ex-boyfriend in the hospital, sees that he's in denial about what happened, and witnesses how roughly dismissive the young man's father (played by Aaron Ashmore) is of his son's suicide attempt, feelings in general, and, it seems, very existence. When the father asks Susan to let Gage stay at her house while the father is working out of town for about a month, she agrees—eventually and begrudgingly, yes, but knowing that this young man can't and doesn't deserve to be left alone under the circumstances.

There's plenty of humor as a result, of course, because Susan and Gage are so different and stuck in a situation that is inherently awkward. There's also a lot of warmth, however, because the screenplay sees how alike the two characters are, as people who feel ignored by Brooke specifically but who also are lonely on a level that goes beyond their connection to one particular person.

Susan's stuck in place after Alan's betrayal (with a woman who "isn't even much younger" than her, she bemoans) and the divorce (The pool has remained empty since that one night, and she refuses to let anyone refill it). Brooke leaving home is just the thing that makes her realize that. Meanwhile, we gradually learn more about Gage, whose father is exactly the man Susan meets and whose mother has been in prison since he was a kid. Brooke dumping him may have been a catalyst for a suicide attempt, but for all his broad smiling and broadly positive attitude, we come to see the pained, heartbroken young man beneath that happy-go-lucky surface.

These are two rich, engaging, and sympathetic characters, played, not as jokes, but as real people with real problems, dreams, and growing self-awareness (Watkins is great, and Gillespie keeps up with her). Suze is genuinely funny and lovely, because the film takes its time to ensure that the characters matter more than anything else here.

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