The Threesome

The Morning After Forever

There is a specific kind of American romantic comedy that died sometime around 2010—the kind where sexual deviance was a punchline and consequences were nonexistent. Chad Hartigan’s *The Threesome* arrives bearing a title that feels like a relic from that era, perhaps suggesting a raunchy, frat-house romp akin to *American Pie*. But Hartigan, a director best known for the aching intimacy of *Little Fish* and the quiet observation of *This Is Martin Bonner*, is interested in a bait-and-switch. He invites the audience in for a fantasy, only to lock the door and force them to sit through the sobering, suffocating reality of the morning after. This is not a film about a sexual act; it is a film about the seismic, life-altering debris left in its wake.



The narrative architecture is deceptively simple: Connor (Jonah Hauer-King), a "nice guy" sound engineer paralyzed by passivity, has long pined for Olivia (Zoey Deutch), a woman whose chaotic energy is both her charm and her armor. When they stumble into a night of intoxication with Jenny (Ruby Cruz), a stranger stood up by her date, the resulting ménage à trois is filmed not as a triumph of libido, but as a desperate collision of three lonely people. Hartigan’s visual language, aided by cinematographer Sing Howe Yam, shifts drastically after the first act. We move from the warm, neon-soaked promise of the bar to the harsh, flat lighting of doctors' offices and living rooms in Little Rock, Arkansas. The film visually drains the romance away, leaving a stark realism that mirrors the characters' sudden plunge into adulthood when both women wind up pregnant.



What follows is less a love triangle and more of a moral crucible. Hauer-King plays Connor with a terrifyingly accurate depiction of modern male drift—he is a man who wants to be good so badly that he ends up standing for nothing. However, the film belongs to the women. Zoey Deutch, an actress capable of finding tragedy in the flightiest of characters, infuses Olivia with a defensiveness that is heartbreaking. She knows she is a "mess," and she wields that self-awareness like a weapon to keep intimacy at bay. In contrast, Ruby Cruz’s Jenny provides the film’s emotional ballast. Her quiet determination to handle an unplanned future challenges the other two to grow up. The film argues that "adulthood" isn't a status you achieve; it is a series of uncomfortable conversations you choose not to run away from.



Ultimately, *The Threesome* struggles slightly under the weight of its own melodrama; the script by Ethan Ogilby stacks the deck with twists that threaten to turn the proceedings into a soap opera. Yet, Hartigan grounds it all in a profound empathy. He refuses to villainize any of the three participants, treating their entanglement as a complex knot of human need rather than a scandalous mistake. In a genre that often ends with a wedding or a grand gesture, Hartigan offers something more substantial: the image of people simply showing up for one another, long after the fantasy has faded. It is a messy, imperfect film, but in its refusal to offer easy answers, it feels vividly, painfully alive.