Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

A modest 2012 indie in which three magazine employees drive to a coastal town to profile the author of a classified ad soliciting a time-travel companion. Aubrey Plaza plays the disillusioned intern, Karan Soni plays a studious pre-med intern, and the film casts them without ceremony. Their backgrounds register as texture, nothing more. Nobody in Ocean View remarks on who is standing next to whom, and the screenplay never asks them to. This is the casual multiethnic ensemble of the late mumblecore era, diverse by accident of good casting rather than by design, and it earns a small measure of credit for simply existing that way.

Plaza's Darius is wry, guarded, and self-possessed, a young woman with a deadpan that functions as armor. The film grants her interiority and a dead mother and a genuine romantic want, which is more than many of its peers manage. Jake Johnson's Jeff, meanwhile, is a womanizer on a sad errand to revisit a teenage fling, and the film lets Liz reject him with a shrug. The critique is present but soft, a raised eyebrow instead of an argument. Nothing here amounts to a thesis about gender, and the film would be baffled to be handed one.

Mark Duplass brings Kenneth to life as a paranoid eccentric who believes agents are watching and who steals lab equipment to build a boat-based time machine. The film treats his obsession as mystery and melancholy, not as a condition to be named and diagnosed. There is no lecture, no moralizing monologue, no fourth wall cracked open to instruct us. It is a character piece about regret and the fantasy of undoing it, warm and small and content to stay that way. We classify it accordingly, with mild admiration and no particular alarm.