Say Less was my first film of Cinejoy 2025: obvious entry as a high school comedy, and one that fulfills a lot of the aspirations of a coming-of-age storyline. It finds a way to tell a different story than those told before it by focusing on a solidly upper class Jewish family in LA. Siblings Cass (Jenny Lange) and Max (Matt Linton) are tangled in a toxic war of attrition on this their one night without their parents before the golden boy, people-pleasing who comes off as all swagger Max goes off to college and the burnout cutter plans a kind of social equivalent of a murder-suicide to ruin her brother’s night. We achieve what appears to be maximal representation with Jewish-Asian representation in the hot tub scene as Sky (Genevieve Thomas) opens up to her boyfriend’s kid sister and an unwitting and schlubby Oliver (Manny Spero) gets played as an annoying thorn in Max’s side.
Blake (Ben Taylor) has an amazing role as the hyperspecific, highly qualified way in which high school boys can be portrayed as hot through the focalized perspective of high school girls while also not being objectively hot. He’s sort of dweeby in a nonthreatening but kind of threatening way?
The comic editing in the first act is good and warms up in the second, when the mean humor becomes more on display. The reactions in an extended scene in which siblings must watch porn together along with their exes is actually amazing. Linton and Lange have an intensity that works and their chemistry as siblings on a collision course works. The mansion as setting works very nicely too. There’s so much to the elements of a high school movie party that reveal the value systems and privilege of the constituents of that demographic and despite the awkwardness of the game of cups and its blocking and lack of editing, director and writer Michael Kellman still finds ways to rachet up the tension.
The original premise of the first act, watching Cassie devise increasingly more and more annoying ways to ruin her brother’s special night with his girlfriend is transformed into an equally fun premise in which two siblings have to figure out how to handle their father’s infidelity as its thrust upon them in the most awkward of ways. And the third act’s introduction of Blake character is very charming. He’s played dumb but smooth, cute, but cruel, and the misdirects for his character are playful.
There’s really only one moment that feels a little too schmaltzy toward the end in which Cass holds up her scars and the camera lingers on them for the first and only time in the movie while actual sad piano music plays and she talks about how “you cut to feel something,” and the entire sequence could’ve been done a little more cleanly without piling it on, but otherwise, no notes. This is an absolutely fun slice of a weirdly specific part of American teenage culture with some excellent comic chops.
