The Hedonist

Nick Funess stars in his own indie comedy about a 27-year-old office drone who, after a nervous breakdown, flees to his parents' house in Arizona and, in the grand tradition of Pretty Woman and Anora, hires a sex worker to spend a week with him. But The Hedonist is nothing like other films with a similar premise. Nor is it an example of the insufferably popular "cringe comedy" trend epitomized by Tim Robinson and Andrew DeYoung's Friendship. While most of the humor here comes at the protagonist's expense (well played by Funess), this movie is not about scoring as many laughs as possible by making the audience feel artificially awkward.

The aesthetic of Funess's picture is deadpan humor, not "cringe comedy". The difference is important. The Hedonist has more in common with Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, Hal Hartley's Henry Fool, and even Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude than with something like The Office. The cast all deliver uniformly blank performances that are impressively cohesive, especially considering that many are non-actors (including Funess's mom and dad, who play his far more animated parents). As Tess, the escort Reed picks up and asks to "take care of him" for a week, Izzi Rojas delivers a thrillingly deadpan turn, in which we never have any idea how they're going to react to things and find ourselves genuinely surprised when they have the same monotonous-but-game response to whatever they're presented with. It is so much harder to create a genuine comedy from something minimalist like this than an over-the-top buffoonfest of exaggeration like Friendship (can ya tell I didn't like Friendship?). Equally impressive, in terms of tonal consistency, is how Funess commits to the reality of his characters by ending his film the way a story like this would actually end.