Rough Night (2017)

Rough Night arrives as a bachelorette-party farce in which five college friends reunite in Miami, accidentally kill a male stripper, and spend the rest of the runtime concealing the body. Lucia Aniello directs, and the film's most substantive cultural gesture is structural: it hands the crude, badly behaved comedy to a female ensemble and lets them be lewd, panicked, and incompetent in the manner typically reserved for men. The point is made by casting and never by dialogue. Jillian Bell's Alice sulks and schemes, Scarlett Johansson's Jess tries to hold a political campaign together by phone, and nobody pauses to explain what any of it means.

Frankie and Blair, two members of the group, are a former couple who drift back together by the closing scene, a same-sex relationship treated as ordinary furniture rather than a thesis. The film lets it sit there, unremarked, which is its own quiet achievement. The casting likewise brings Zoë Kravitz into the ensemble, and the script draws no racial themes from her presence. Race is simply not on the agenda. The result is diversity without commentary, which is either a sign of maturity or a sign that the writers had other things on their minds, chiefly a corpse.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. A diamond heist surfaces in the third act, though the stolen gems function as plot machinery and generate no critique of wealth. Nobody mentions the climate. Nobody mentions their body. Alice's mother is implied to have dementia, a detail that serves as a late emotional lever and nothing further. The film is a contemporary farce with no interest in history, and no interest in correcting it. That leaves a raunchy comedy which wants to amuse, not instruct, and any message it carries is incidental, smuggled in by a casting director who was probably just hiring the funniest available people.