THE TROUBLE WITH JESSICA - Mark Reviews Movies

The Trouble with Jessica, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

The trouble with The Trouble with Jessica is mostly one of tone. Here's a comedy that wants to be callous or, at least, a little mean about its characters, but screenwriters Matt Win, who also directed, and James Handel can't bring themselves to be as cold and cruel as the situation they've imagined.

To be clear, this is a screwball comedy about a group of friends who have to decide what to do with the corpse of another one of their friends. The obvious thing, of course, would be to call the police, but once one of the group declares that would be a bad idea, it's only a matter of time before all of them are trying to figure out how to move a dead body across London without getting caught.

The dead friend, of course, is Jessica (Indira Varma), who arrives as a somewhat uninvited guest at a dinner party being held by Tom (Alan Tudyk) and Sarah (Shirley Henderson). The married couple have fallen upon tough times financially as of late, and they have decided to sell their house—the one they bought and in which they raised a couple of children, who have since moved away for college, some years ago. This get-together is to be the last one they have at the house, before a wealthy couple likely buys it.

The friends Tom and Sarah actually want at dinner are husband and wife Richard (Rufus Sewell) and Beth (Olivia Williams). They've all known each other in some way since college, and while Jessica wasn't technically invited, the other couple thought it might be good for her to come with them. She has had a difficult time over the years, although Jessica has transformed her pain and sometimes self-destructive behavior into a best-selling memoir.

Sarah can't stand her, because Jessica seems so self-involved and always flirts with Tom right in front of her. This isn't enough reason to hate, dislike, or even feel apathetic toward Jessica, which is the first misstep of a movie that should be more about watching the bad decisions these characters make—not wondering why the entire comedic premise falls flat.

It does so, basically, because the stakes of the plot aren't particularly believable, although that could be excused because these characters are meant to be acting illogically and definitely do so, and the whole business of Jessica's death is simply too tragic to find much, if anything, funny about it. After some bittersweet conversations with the two men and Sarah lashing out at her, Jessica hangs herself in the garden.

There's a way this could be darkly amusing, although that would mean the script would have to make Jessica into the kind of character whose death is more of an unfortunate inconvenience for these characters than a reason to feel bad about her. By the end, the movie eventually does a complete turnaround on how everyone perceives Jessica, and while one could say it's decent of the filmmakers to consider—even if belatedly so—that point of view, it's the wrong choice to make if the point of the story is to laugh at the comedic problems her death has caused.

That is what this story becomes. Sarah realizes that to report Jessica's suicide to the police would be for the potential buyers to learn of a woman's death in the house they're planning to purchase. She and Tom desperately need the money from the sale, and while they're instantly on board with a scheme to move Jessica's body from the garden to her apartment across town, Richard and Beth need some convincing. A little emotional blackmail toward Beth might work, and some actual blackmail toward Richard definitely will.

From there, a lot of shenanigans ensue involving unwelcome guests, such as a nosy neighbor (played by Anne Reid) who's a fan of Jessica's book, a couple of cops who are answering an emergency call from earlier, and, because it might as well happen, the rich man (played by Sylvester Groth) whose wife (played by Amber Rose Revah) wants to buy the house. There's not much physical comedy involving the corpse here, likely because the filmmakers know that the third-act shift in tone is coming and don't want to be accused of being insensitive, so the humor mostly comes from the constant bickering, backstabbing, and backwards-and-forwards of morality among the group of friends.

Some of that is legitimately funny, mainly because the cast is game (Sewell's outbursts are especially so, since he establishes the character as so straitlaced and professional at the start). Most of The Trouble with Jessica, though, isn't, because it doesn't lack the heart to be as cruel as finding any real humor in this situation requires.

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