Adulthood review: Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario team up for corpse-centric comedy

A soul-scratching milestone of becoming a grown-up is the realization that your parents aren’t just your parents, they’re people. They have names. They have lives outside of you, and they have flaws. This jarring epiphany is taken to darkly comic extremes in Adulthood, which stars Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario as siblings who discover a corpse hidden in their childhood home. 

This premise seems like something out of Dateline, but director Alex Winter plumbs Michael M.B. Galvin’s script for heart, humor, and some cringe-inducing truths. The result is a comedy that’s amusingly irreverent, surprisingly twisted, and fucked-up fun. 

Adulthood is like Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead‘s twisted sister. 

Gad and Scodelario star as siblings who are practically estranged at the film’s start. While Megan’s been living in their hometown, raising her two sons, loving her professor husband, and selling sketchy leggings online in a seeming pyramid screen, her brother Noah took off to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, though he’s more focused on smoking pot than selling spec scripts. 

They’re reunited by bad news: Their mother Judy (Ingunn Omholt) has taken a bad turn, and is in the hospital. Luckily, her homecare nurse (Billie Lourd) was on hand. Unluckily, returning to their childhood home leads to one shitty discovery after another. A leak in the basement den not only leads to a bunch of their childhood treasures being damaged, it’s also ruined the paneling of one wall. And when they probe this strange wet spot, they find a skeleton in a tracksuit. 

Far from a murder mystery, Adulthood is a tale of a comedic cover-up. Sure, Megan and Noah are shocked to find a body in the walls of this suburban home, mere yards from where their mom stored Pokémon cards and old VHS tapes. But they immediately know who this skeleton belongs to, and the big question is, “Now what?” Reasoning that coming clean would only reignite old scars for the victim’s family and cause new problems for their own, they decide the best thing to do is dump the remains somewhere remote. But it turns out neither of these siblings shares their parents’ skill for criminal cover-ups. So, a comedy of errors ensues, involving blackmail, more kills, and a creepy cousin named Bodhi (Anthony Carrigan)

Don’t miss out on our latest stories: Add Mashable as a trusted news source in Google.

While their mom is still alive, she’s incapable of taking care of this grisly business. So, like the treasured 1991 comedy Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead, Adulthood explores the wild feeling of having to be the grown-up when things truly go to hell. Except here instead of finding their inner girlboss, Noah and Megan have to find their inner Robert Durst. 

Kaya Scodelario and Josh Gad make a solid comedy duo. 

The English actress is best known for dramatic roles, like the British TV series Skins, Andrea Arnold’s feral adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the YA Mazerunner trilogy, and the gator creature feature Crawl. But here, she plays a terrific straight man to Gad’s frantic clown. To his credit, the Broadway and Disney actor tones down his signature hyperactive energy; Noah is leagues away from Book of Mormon‘s Elder Cunningham or Frozen‘s Olaf. Here, he’s a manchild who turns to video games, weed, and porn in times of stress — or just in general. 

This means that while the siblings’ mission is to help their mom get away with murder, the central conflict of the movie is actually about brother and sister learning what it means to be a grown-up. Having fucked off to LA, Noah hasn’t had to deal with his sister’s life or his mom’s declining health. He doesn’t even remember the names of his nephews. But Megan’s been using her busy role as working mom as an excuse to keep her distance from her brother and mom as well. (This is something the aforementioned caregiver acknowledges with a snarl as she drinks Noah’s beer and lays down a number of shocking revelations.) 

While Gad’s freaking out as Noah, Megan’s keeping her cool, making for punchlines that hit hard and cold. But beneath their contrast and this comedy is the question of what it means to be an adult. Is it defending your family at all costs? Or does it mean taking responsibility and facing the consequences? Or is there a third, more craven and comedic option? 

Billie Lourd and Anthony Carrigan shine as weirdo supporting players. 

Playing the threatening caregiver and the black sheep cousin, Lourd and Carrigan echo the siblings’ dynamic, but they are in opposition. One is blackmailing the siblings while the other is called into defend them. And in this, the extremes of cold and calculating and hyper and impulsive are explored to the point that a diner scene between Lourd and Carrigan could be the best in the movie. Staring each other down while both characters swing for badass heft but come off whiffing, they make it seem like anything is possible. And actually, from there the movie gets less exciting as the answers of Galvin’s script become less interesting or even feasible. 

Adulthood is more focused on the dysfunctional family comedy aspect than its crime thriller thread, which means that as the stakes get higher, the plot holes get bigger and more distracting. At one point. Noah confidently declares he knows how to best ditch a body because he worked on Blue Bloods. It’s a fine joke. But for fans of true crime or even cozy crime, it’s too easy to clock the clues being dropped, and frustratingly never acknowledged. This makes for an unsatisfying ending, as it’s not so much ambiguous as unearned. 

Still, if you’re seeking something funky, funny, and charmingly chaotic, Adulthood delivers. 

Adulthood was reviewed out of its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie opens in theaters Sept. 19, and comes to digital on Sept. 23.

​Mashable