Somebody I Used to Know stars Alison Brie (Community), who co-wrote the film with her real-life partner Dave Franco, who also directed. She plays Ally, a reality TV producer who, after her show is cancelled, heads back home to Leavenworth, Washington to take a break.
A chance run-in with her ex Sean (Top Gun: Maverick's Jay Ellis) leads her to question everything about her life, which only gets more confusing when Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons) — Sean's fiancée — enters the picture, reminding Ally of the woman she used to be.
Somebody I Used to Know has a dreaminess to it, a kind of ethereal quality that sets it apart from so many contemporary rom-coms. Perhaps it's the sweeping Washington landscapes, Leavenworth's melding of Americana and Alpine, that place the people of our story in a sort of otherworldliness.
It's a fitting atmosphere for a woman in her own state of suspended reality; she has no clear career path and no intimate attachments. Ally is a very specific character, but she is also a touchstone for an older-millennial woman's malaise.
There is a poignant moment early on when Ally laments having built her whole life around one thing, and suggests that maybe she picked the wrong thing. Where the film falls down in this exploration of success (particularly success as a woman) is that it doesn't seem to suggest that perhaps the mistake wasn't in the thing she chose, but rather picking one thing at all.
The particular notion of 'Can we really have it all' is often pegged to women (just look at the newspaper headlines after New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern resigned) and it might have been compelling if Ally didn't swap career angst for romantic angst, but rather broadened her view to imagine a life in which two things, or more, could coexist. That, perhaps, wouldn't make it a rom-com, though.
And as a rom-com, Somebody I Used to Know balances both elements of the genre well. There's a quiet, simmering chemistry between Brie and Ellis, and a more charged dynamic between Brie and Clemons that make the love-and-self-discovery-triangle feel genuinely fraught, with real stakes not just for the literal immediate physical life of these characters, but their internal worlds, too.
Brie and Franco, as co-creators, seem to know they are bound by the conventions of the genre, and don't flout them as such but push their boundaries. Cleverly, they incorporate the obvious parallel to My Best Friend's Wedding into the characters' own understanding of their situation, which grounds the movie in an internal reality that we as an audience can relate to.
Everyone in this film is flawed, but not in a way that makes us any less empathetic toward their plights, nor in a way that paints anyone particularly as the victim of others' machinations. The grounded human characters is what allows the rest of the movie to take liberties with reality in the way that most rom-coms do.
Perhaps most importantly, the end doesn't feel totally like a foregone conclusion. Each character earns their end, and you find you're happy you were along with them for the journey.
Somebody I Used to Know is now out on Amazon Prime Video
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