I DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU: 3 STARS. “Mean spirited, but often very funny.”
SYNOPSIS: In “I Don’t Understand You,” a new horror-comedy now playing in theatres, Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells play Dom and Cole, a wealthy American couple whose tenth anniversary trip to Italy devolves into chaos when they get lost on the way to a fancy restaurant located in a rural farm. “I thought we would die here,” Cole says. “Alone in a rental car.” Complicating an already complicated situation, their surrogate (Amanda Seyfried) goes into early labor and asks them to return from their trip earlier than planned.
CAST: Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Morgan Spector, Eleonora Romandini and Amanda Seyfried. Written and directed by David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano.
REVIEW: Mean spirited, but often very funny, “I Don’t Understand You” mixes deadpan humor with buckets of blood in a story of a vacation gone horribly wrong.
Loosely based on the real-life vacations-gone-wild and adoption fraud experiences of writer/directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie is a farcical mix-and-match of misunderstandings and murder that still manages to find time for tenderness.
That comes courtesy of Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells, who, when they aren’t accidentally killing the locals, have great chemistry and the lived-in feel of a real couple. That both are also masters of the throw-away, funny comment is an added bonus as they humorously remark on the increasingly chaotic goings on.
As funny as the leads are, the movie struggles to reconcile adoption anxiety and mayhem. The story’s adoption fraud angle is left mostly unexplored, serving primarily as a McGuffin for the mayhem in Italy. As a result, “I Don’t Understand You” has some tonal problems, but its commitment to outrageous fun trumps whatever wonky feeling is left behind by the script.
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