Disclaimer: I watch films with audio description, and this film has available audio description.

Michael Angelo Corvino directs and co-wrote this silly comedy with Kyle Marvin. If you want a fresh look on modern relationships, you can’t get much more modern than this. Marvin and Corvino play friends who get tangled up in relationship drama with their respective partners, played by Dakota Johnson and Adria Arijona, which gets complicated in a web of everyone trying to be open to everything to appease their partners. When Cary (Marvin) gets rather unsettling news from his partner (Arijona), he literally flees the scene, running straight to his best friend’s, Paul (Corvino), and looks for a safe place to land. Paul already has a wife (Johnson) and son, but Cary can’t go home just yet. Things change when Cary finds out that his friend is in an open marriage, and they are free to sleep with whoever. that leads to Cary sleeping with Paul’s wife Julie, which in turn leads to the best stunt choreography of the year. I voted for this so many times in every awards I could. The audio description is terrific through it, but it is an extended brawl that moves through the house, and destroys so much. it felt like the live action version of those fights Peter always has with the chicken on Family Guy. Rather sudden, and going on hilariously too long.

Cary is going to take a page from the open marriage book, and return home, deciding he’s going to live there with Ashley (Arijona) who is seeing other people, and act perfectly fine with it. In fact, he becomes annoyingly chill about it, befriending all her male conquests (and female), inviting them to continue to hang out all the time.

Corvino and Marvin perfectly hold up this silly lens to the modern relationship, questioning the validity of any of it, but never completely making the situation beyond the point of redemption. It certainly complicates every relationship, but in an odd way, they all get stronger as a result, and end up this weird family unit as a result. This is obvious when Cary’s caravan of friends, who all slept with Ashley, are there at Julie’s son’s birthday. This absurdist take on found family hits home, because there’s nothing else like it. No one else has ever had the audacity, or gumption, to go where Marvin and Corvino go.

If I had to pick one qualm, it is just that the way the film is packaged, Ashley feels too much like she’s on the exterior of the bubble, instead of a valid part of this weird foursome. When she starts taking up screentime, so do this onslaught of partners, played by more than a few recognizable faces like Nicholas Braun (Succession).

I’m reviewing this off my second viewing, and the film got better, which is a great sign for its future with me. I enjoyed it a little more, not a little less.

This isn’t your mother’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, but certainly would be welcomed by anyone looking for a modern take on free love, exploration, and a willingness to seem up for anything even if you aren’t. Also, kudos to the stunt coordinator here, who deserved a lot more love.

Fresh: 7.9/10