Newness (2017)

Drake Doremus has spent a career filming attractive people failing to communicate, and Newness is his most clinical specimen yet. Two Los Angeles millennials, a divorced pharmacist and a Spanish physical therapy assistant, meet on a dating app, move in together within days, cheat on each other within weeks, and then negotiate an open relationship as a cure for their restlessness. The camera hovers. The apartments are tasteful. The sex is shot with the detachment of a dental hygienist taking notes. This is a film about modern love as logistics.

On the cultural ledger, the picture is largely blank. The ensemble is diverse in the ordinary way a Los Angeles production tends to be, with Laia Costa, Pom Klementieff, Jessica Henwick and Courtney Eaton filling out the frame, and nobody in the film remarks on it. Gabriella pursues her own desires with a directness that gestures toward female sexual autonomy, though the screenplay treats this as relationship trouble instead of a manifesto. Race never surfaces. Class never surfaces. The affluent backdrop of dinner parties and glass-walled condos goes entirely unexamined. The mother's dementia is a plot mechanism, not a statement about cognition. Anyone hunting for a sermon on the climate or the sins of capital will leave hungry.

What the film does carry is a faint whiff of the seminar. Critics at the time called it a thesis movie, and they were right, though the thesis arrives as observation instead of instruction. It asks whether intimacy can survive abundance and finds the answer discouraging. The result is competent, chilly, and oddly forgettable, a study of people who mistake novelty for depth. We have seen this couple before. We will see them again.