The sharpest gag in Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults, a dramedy about compulsive joke-tellers who do comedy routines to distract from their severe emotional dysfunction, might be the title, which prods at the childhood regression of three nominally adult siblings some years following the death of their parents. Disparate and aimless into their twenties and thirties, Eric (Michael Cera), Rachel (Hannah Gross), and Maggie (Sophia Lillis) aren’t coming of age so much as playacting the part of adults while recycling canned bits from their youth, self-soothing as they wait for someone more mature to tell them what to do. Though The Adults is at times diminished more than it’s enriched by its echoes of other texts about wayward children skulking back to their childhood home, as well as family narratives…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 95 - Summer 2023