‘If you spend your whole life looking for perfect… you wind up with nothing...’
As a 36-year-old man, the last five years or so have been full to the brim of weddings. I’ve got marks on my face from all the confetti. My eyes are red and swollen from the crying. I’m full of wedding cake and expensive beer. The whole nine yards. Whilst I’d have preferred this period of my life to be like Wedding Crashers, Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer’s romcom Plus One is closer to the truth…
Stuck in a rut and flailing two single friends, Ben (Jack Quaid) and Alice (Maya Erskine) make a pact to attend all of the various weddings they are each invited to together thus making them a less painful experience overall.
Chan and Rhymer do a great job of capturing the ennui and emotional overload of attending wedding after wedding. Happily (smugly?), I was the first of my friends to get married so I never had that weird longing and sadness that comes with being a single person at a wedding. Plus One perfectly captures the unique energy that weddings inspire and it does so in a way that is funny, warm and poignant. I’m a massive fan of Quaid, mainly for his work in Scream (2022) and The Boys, and I also adored Erskine’s excellent teenage sitcom Pen15 (co-created by Anna Konkle who has a lovely cameo here), so to see them share such an authentic chemistry in this film was a real joy. I’m surprised this movie wasn’t a bigger deal (I only know about it because it was mentioned on the Halloweenies podcast in passing) as this is one of those rare films that I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying. It’s too wholesome and funny. The leads are too likeable. How could anyone possibly resist?
The romcom is not a genre I generally enjoy but when it’s done well it can be dynamite. This is one of the best.