Review: Adult Life Skills

From its opening scene, Adult Life Skills leans hard on preciousness and quirk. The film begins with the 30-year-old Anna (Jodie Whittaker) living in a cluttered shed in her mother Marion’s (Lorraine Ashbourne) backyard, where she mopes around and mourns her twin brother’s (Edward Hogg) death by making DIY sci-fi films using handmade sets and starring her thumbs with faces painted on them. Before the credits even roll, we’re also made acutely aware of Anna’s propensity for punnery in the array of hand-drawn signs that identify her de facto fort both as “Shed Zeppelin” and “Right Shed Fred.” In fact, there’s nary a scene where the film doesn’t go about inelegantly foregrounding its contrived eccentricities.

Anna’s case of arrested development is treated as a recent phenomenon by her immediate family, as well as by her best friend, Fiona (Rachael Deering). Yet based on her current living situation and clips from the goofy videos she made with her brother in the not-too-distant past, it’s hard to gauge how much of Anna’s sad state of affairs was caused by the grief she still carries and how much of it is a natural extension of her relentlessly offbeat personality. This murkiness surrounding the causes and extent of Anna’s seemingly permanent stasis stems from the film’s refusal to delve into its protagonist’s psyche or develop a remotely convincing backstory for her. Writer-director Rachel Tunnard is instead content to reduce Anna to a bumbling hot mess who’s always on the verge of a tears or panic attack.

Anna’s idiosyncrasies are only further highlighted when she’s tasked with watching over the eight-year old Clint (Ozzy Myers) after the boy’s mother is suddenly hospitalized. In another of the film’s clumsy juxtapositions of whimsy and melancholy, Clint’s morose demeanor is contrasted by the cowboy outfit he constantly dons. As Clint’s sorrow at his mother’s absence manifests itself in a desire to mimic Anna, Tunnard briefly flirts with tapping into the power of communal grieving as Anna begrudgingly grows closer to the youngster and breaks out of her shell. But the characters are so thinly conceived—little more than an assemblage of various affectations—that these sudden stabs at authenticity and pathos ring forced and hollow.

Adult Life Skills, which Tunnard adapted from her 2014 short film Emotional Fusebox, continues to strain for poignancy through Anna’s repeated visions of her brother, who’s dressed in snorkeling gear for no discernable reason. These scenes offer a potentially interesting shift into magical realism that could have served to explicate Anna’s relationship with her brother through meaningful subtext, but instead they offer cheap platitudes, failing to provide either substance or specificity to Anna’s melancholy. And as the film sputters on, it becomes particularly clear that it’s not interested in genuinely exploring the grieving process so much as using it to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.