Plus One (Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer, 2019)

Faced with a year of weddings by various friends and family, friends Alice (Maya Erksine) and Ben (Jack Quaid) decide to join forces to take them all on as the other's plus one. 

As they tough it out through various nuptials, the old friends find themselves drawn closer together...

“What is a ‘meet cute’?”

I feel like every time I review a romcom or a thriller it starts with some variation of ‘they do not make this any more’ or ‘I cannot remember the last time I watched a romcom…’

As I mentioned in my previous review, these kinds of mid-budget genres used to be the bread and butter of the Hollywood studios. Now you’re lucky if you get one or two.

I only heard about this movie a few months ago, and I immediately scribbled its title down. 

An independent production picked up and released by Hulu, Plus One is the kind of movie that studios would have been drooling over in the nineties and noughties. The fact this movie stars Jack Quaid, the offspring of one of the genre’s leading lights (Meg Ryan for those who cannot google), feels like a bitter in-joke at the state of the genre.

Interspersed with footage of wedding speeches, Plus One may have some of the aesthetic trappings of an indie (handheld camerawork, naturalistic lighting) but its bones are pure romcom. 

The initial reveal of the characters’ roles: Erskine is the depressed version of a screwball comedy heroine, with Quaid as the deceptively square object of her affections.

Erskine was an unknown quality to me. She is very funny, and manages to thread the needle by not losing the character’s underlying loneliness. The key difference between Alice and Ben is that she is open about her problems and has no time for innuendo or niceties. 

As with his role in Companion, Quaid is playing with the idea of a ‘nice guy’ - the idea being ‘nice’ does not equate to ‘good’. The character is not honest about his intentions, and he has a terrifyingly idealised view of marriage. 

Despite the inevitable romantic close, this is a romantic comedy that does not evade or obscure the realities of relationships - not all of them last, and just because they end does not mean they should be viewed in binary terms of success or failure. 

I was also impressed with how efficient the film is in its story-telling. It manages the trick of presenting as naturalistic, but it never loses track of the characters’ journey. One aspect of the film I liked is how the film placed dialogue and exposition into more dynamic contexts, like a golf game.

Warm without being maudlin, earnest about romance without romanticising it, Plus One is a gem of a movie.

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