I Give It a Year (2013)

Dan Mazer's I Give It a Year arrives as a brisk 2013 anti-romance, set in London and built on a simple cruel joke. Nat, an advertising executive played by Rose Byrne, and Josh, a struggling writer played by Rafe Spall, marry after seven months and spend the next year discovering they cannot stand each other. The cast is a uniformly white ensemble of British and American comedic performers. Race never enters the frame. Neither does any LGBTQ thread. The entire engine is heterosexual marriage, temptation, and eventual partner swap. It is a comedy of manners with no manners, which is the kindest description of its moral position.

Nat's ambition as an advertising executive is present, but the film treats her career mostly as a source of marital friction. That gives it a faint flicker of feminist possibility, no more. The solvent business subplot exists to put her near Guy, not to examine wealth. The lingerie shop sequence plays as farce, not body acceptance. No neurodivergent characters appear. No climate anxiety intrudes. No historical record is revised. The film operates in a wholly white, raceless register, and its romantic assumptions are entirely conventional. It is not preachy. It is sour. The moralizing impulse is minimal because Mazer has no sermon to deliver, only a punchline about how wrong two people can be for each other.

By the end, Josh and Nat ask for a divorce with visible relief, then cheerfully pursue Chloe and Guy. The film is rude, brisk, and committed to incompatibility. It offers no progressive blueprint, no moral instruction, no call to improve the viewer. The remainder is a modest British comedy that wants to be funny about marrying the wrong person. It succeeds often enough to be watchable and fails often enough to be forgotten. In the ledger of social consciousness, it is mostly blank, with only Nat's career and the film's cynical bite registering as faint traces. The rest is wedding gifts, bad speeches, and the quiet horror of a honeymoon story told twice.