Director: Lawrence Michael Levine
Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon
Running Time: 104 minutes
Synopsis: Two separate stories unfold sequentially at the same isolated resort lake house. In the first, film director and former actress Allison (Aubrey Plaza) is struggling with writer's block, and arrives at the resort looking for inspiration. She is quickly caught in the bickering crossfire of the resort operators Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant girlfriend Blair (Sarah Gadon). In the second part, Gabe is a film director directing his wife Allison in a domestic drama. He pretends to be having an affair with actress Blair to extract a searing performance out of Allison.
What Works Well: Some sizzle lurks in the spiky sparring of mismatched couple Gabe and Blair, where every word is scrutinized, challenged, and shredded. Aubrey Plaza's performance as the wronged actress and disrespected wife is scintillatingly raw, despite her character's over-dependence on mind-altering substances.
What Does Not Work As Well: This experimental and independent drama does not lack ambition in drawing inspiration from Who's Afraid Of Virginia Wolf?, but the rough results best belong on a small theatre stage. The two-part structure exposes an unsuccessful search for a framework to nurture underdeveloped ideas about feminism, fidelity, and deceit, and both segments suffer from meanness expressed by overheated and infantile emotions. The second half is cluttered by the film-within-a-film crew, either ironically or methodically ticking off diversity boxes while still confining the secondary characters to interchangeable stereotypes.
Key Quote:
Gabe (to Allison about Blair): She can't stand the fact that I have a single thought about this world.
Blair: No, it's not that I can't stand that you have the thoughts about the world. It's that I can't stand the thoughts about the world that you have.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.