Early on in “Adulthood,” siblings Meg and Noah Robles suddenly — and unhappily — learn why they never got to have a dog growing up.
It’s not because their parents didn’t think they could handle the responsibility or because dogs can be messy. It’s because there was a body walled up in the basement.
“How could our parents act like nothing ever happened?” Noah Robles asks. “That’s worse than the killing. It’s not, but still. They called it the ‘playroom.’”
That 30-year-old corpse will soon unleash a suburban comedy of errors as the bungling brother and sister — raised on TV police procedurals — try to find a way out of this mess without losing their freedom or precarious lifestyles.
“I wrote for two seasons on ‘Blue Bloods.’ I know how cops think,” says Noah Robles, a wonderfully childlike loser played by Josh Gad. His man-boy is a failed screenwriter in an Alamo Drafthouse T-shirt with maxed out credit cards.
Director Alex Winter and screenwriter Michael M.B. Galvin combine for a pitch-perfect black comedy that has a nifty satirical edge, inverting the movie convention of discovering that the kids are monsters.
Meg — played with lovely comic timing by a languid Kaya Scodelario — brings her young children to a dangerous payoff meet because she couldn’t get child care and loses her cool when she’s mocked for missing a yoga class. “Have a good day. Make good choices,” she tells her kids even as she clearly doesn’t.
Not long after the body in the basement is found, more bodies start piling up, as does the extortion, sword play, swirling detectives and so-called heavies who look the part even if they’re really lambs. If you liked “Fargo,” “Adulthood” is for you. It’s all about the noose slowly tightening.
“Once we do this, there’s no going back, Meg. Even years from now you’ll think about it when you’re trying to get to sleep,” the brother tells his sister as they decide what to do about the body. “It’ll pop in your head at random times.”
Winter keeps the tension tight but nicely steps off the gas for some neat touches — like a conversation between the siblings about moving on that’s set against a child’s flag-football game — while both Gad and Scodelario take turns being the strong one.
He offers advice about not leaving evidence while moving a dead body — “You should put some towels down” — and she juggles mundane tasks like Zoom meetings and checking her son’s glucose levels with slamming a hammer into someone’s skull, like just another task for stressed-out parents these days.
Fitting for a movie with an actual skeleton in a closet, “Adulthood” is about legacy and how we become our parents. It’s also about recognizing that our parents are human and complicated.
Very rarely do such movies end well. They peter out or ramp up the violence to absurd and pointless levels. “Adulthood” finds the sweet spot and lands the thing perfectly. If you think Meg and Noah are monsters, what would you do in a similar situation? There are probably monsters like that everywhere. They even might be in the foldable chair next to you at the flag football game.
“Adulthood,” a Republic Pictures release that opens in select theaters on Friday and streams on Sept. 23, is rated R for “violence, language throughout, drug use and brief sexual material.” Running time: 97 minutes. Three stars out of four.
