Parsing The Overnight's Tender Group Sex and Delicate Giant Schlong

Watching the trailer for indie writer/director Patrick Brice’s new movie The Overnight implies one thing: Group sex. Two married couples are going to get fucked up at a dinner party and they’re going to get down.

With a cast featuring Adam Scott (Alex) and Jason Schwartzman (Kurt), what’s on the plate for the viewer would seemingly be a lot of awkward encounters, bolstered by their respective brands of deadpan. But what the film actually accomplishes is a reinvention of the tired comedy trope that sex and your sense of self die after marriage. In the case of Alex and his wife Emily (played by Orange is the New Black’s Taylor Schilling), time and their son RJ seem to be at the forefront of their inability to have a regular sexual relationship. But they also are lacking a genuine chemistry and their marital bed often sees more side-by-side solo action than a proper shared sexual finale. (Schilling’s cry for “circles” in the movie’s opening scene was uncomfortably familiar for anyone who’s had to deal with a lackluster, unintuitive partner.)

Still, there are other desires stake here. The couple has relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles and they have to navigate the awkward song and dance of making new friends as adults. A chance meeting at the park with Kurt, whose son Wade hits it off in the sandbox with RJ, leads to an invitation to Kurt and his wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche)’s family pizza night.

And then group sex, right?

Right?

With Kurt and Charlotte’s aggressive kindness to Alex and Emily, and an innocent hand-holding advance when the couples put their sons to bed to drink more wine and smoke weed, the film begins to develop a discomforting restrained urgency that should ultimately produce the money shot. But Alex is too riddled with insecurity—he rips the label off a bottle of two-buck Chuck before they arrive and tells Charlotte it’s from a farm who recycles old bottles: “It’s organic”—and their new friends only seem to bolster his sense of inadequacy.

That’s when, in the film, you start to notice that the characters have been casted and styled to mirror each other in every moment, with Kurt and Charlotte as Alex and Emily. That we all have our self-doubts. The Overnight takes on more of the “Who am I, who are you?” theme of The One I Love (which stars Mark Duplass, who also serves as this film’s executive producer alongside brother Jay) than it is a millennial Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The film, ultimately, is not about a screwball parent orgy, it’s about how we interact with our day-to-day life, especially our bodies, and how our perceptions of others makes us consider how we live. It asks the characters if they engage with the world in a way that is actually satisfying. “Do something to nurture your soul,” Charlotte tells Alex when they talk about being stay-at-home parents.

Naturally, a movie that is so much about confronting your physical self that is also a comedy is loaded with body humor. Charlotte was an actress in her native France and a screening of one of her roles reveals too much (no spoilers) of her to Alex and Emily, who have only known the couple for a few hours; Kurt is a painter whose focus is on a very specific nether region (again, no spoilers) and he proudly shows off his work to Alex in seclusion; of course, what is a drunk-and-stoned sex comedy without the foreplay of skinny-dipping?

But what happens in and around the pool gives way to some visceral but tender moments of vulnerability. Schwartzman is fashioned with a monster prosthetic dong, and his big ol’ schlong is an agent for Alex and Emily to come to terms with their respective cravings. If you’ve been waiting for a bevy of male full-frontal (that isn’t shrouded in depression, as it is with some of the more famous insistences, like Boogie Nights or Shame), then The Overnight is for you. Just shed your expectations for an Apatowian romp.

Ultimately, The Overnight, with all its strained pacing over a minimal 78 minutes, is about radical honesty and the unutterable thorniness of achieving it. Is there group sex? I told you, no spoilers. But there is, at least, the messy undercurrent that bleeds throughout peoples’ most intimate relationships. It tackles the monotony of comfort and shows that it doesn’t matter how interesting your life is—Kurt is a water-filter salesman by trade, which allows their family to travel the world—or whether you can maintain some semblance of sexual chemistry as time goes on, real or not. The movie is about the necessity of remaining present even when you’ve crossed the finish line in the race to heteronormative life goals. That there is always something new to explore in life, whether through hobbies or friendship, and that it is never ok to settle for emotional defeat. And maybe group sex.

Claire Lobenfeld is a music and culture writer, TV recapper and amateur basketball journalist living in New York.