Introduction
There is a special sort of thrill that comes from a good suburban noir: a quiet neighborhood hiding a rotting secret, a family forced to reckon with the past, and the creeping realization that nothing is as it seems. Alex Winter’s Adulthood sets out to capture that feeling while wrapping it in the looser rhythms of a comedy. On paper the hook is irresistible: siblings return home to care for their ailing mother and discover a decaying body hidden in the basement wall.
The corpse belongs to Patty, a neighbor who vanished back in the early 1990s. The discovery should unlock a chain of confession, suspicion, and darkly comic mishaps. Instead, the film repeatedly taps the brakes when it needs to stomp the gas. The result is a noir comedy that commits the most avoidable crime in the genre: it makes murder feel ordinary.
What follows is a deep dive into how Adulthood works when it does, why it often does not, and what it might have done differently. The goal here is not to pile on, but to give the film a fair reading as a crafted piece of storytelling: its tone, structure, performances, and thematic ambitions.
The Premise That Promises More Than It Delivers
At the center are Meg and Noah, played by Kaya Scodelario and Josh Gad. They arrive at their childhood home with the usual mix of duty and resentment that tends to accompany caretaking trips. That dynamic is fertile ground for humor and hurt. In an early stretch the film locates a tender groove: Meg and Noah reminisce about their block, the neighbor who vanished, and the way those childhood fears still hum beneath adult bravado. Then the hammer drops: a literal skeleton in the literal wall.
For a few scenes, Adulthood understands the macabre thrill of discovery. The basement is cramped, the air feels stale, and the siblings oscillate between shock and deadpan. The film identifies the remains as Patty’s, which instantly reframes the family’s memories of a neighborhood that once blamed Patty’s husband and then splintered. This is strong noir footing.
It is also a lovely pivot for a comedy about the lies families tell to keep the peace. Unfortunately the script cannot decide whether it is a sharp-edged farce, a mournful mystery, or a prickly character study. It tries to be all three, and the tonal mixing keeps curdling.
The Tone Problem: Satire Without Bite, Mystery Without Stakes
Noir comedy is a high wire act. The jokes must land without puncturing the suspense, and the suspense must escalate without smothering the laughs. Adulthood often settles for a safe middle where neither element rises above lukewarm. Scenes that begin with promise are undercut by punch lines that do not spring from character or situation. Suspenseful beats end with shrugs instead of revelations. When humor slides in as a rimshot instead of a release valve, the audience stops believing in the danger. When danger never convincingly builds, the humor does not enjoy anything to release.
The screenplay resorts to tonal shortcuts: needle drops, quippy side characters, and the occasional freeze on a reaction that begs for a laugh track. Those devices can be delightful inside a well constructed set piece. Here they frequently feel like patches over story holes, not expressions of the film’s voice. The tonal whiplash is especially rough in the middle third, where clues are introduced with the rhythm of a mystery but are treated with the weight of a sketch.
Performances: A Study In Competing Energies
Kaya Scodelario as Meg
Scodelario finds truth in Meg’s flinty practicality. There is a lived in rhythm to how she catalogs problems, triages them, and quietly picks up the emotional labor around the house. Scodelario excels at playing characters who keep blazing cores behind cool surfaces. Meg has exactly that quality, and whenever the camera lingers, the film hints at a richer drama about the roles daughters inherit. When the script lets her drive a scene, the comedy arises from Meg’s razor calm in the face of absurdity, which is the best kind of noir humor.
Josh Gad as Noah
Gad brings manic energy and a desire to play with timing. He can wring a chuckle from a throwaway reaction and land a heartbroken line with an unexpected softness. The problem is that the film often positions Noah as the designated pressure valve: the one who deflates tension whenever it threatens to peak. That choice keeps the tone from sharpening. Gad is most effective when the performance grounds Noah’s nervous chatter in genuine fear or sibling guilt. When the material leans on Noah to service bit after bit, the character turns into a tonal switch rather than a person.
Chemistry And Family Dynamics
Scodelario and Gad share a credible sibling rhythm: overlapping dialogue, old wounds surfacing in mundane arguments, tiny gestures of care they refuse to discuss. The movie’s best passages are throwaway domestic beats: washing a dish while circling a confession, competing to interpret a childhood memory, deciding who calls the plumber when a wall yields bones. If Adulthood had trusted that dynamic to carry the comedy while it darkened the mystery, the tonal balance might have stabilized.
Direction And Pacing: Scenes That Start Strong And Drift
Alex Winter gives the film a consistent visual idea: comfortable suburban frames corrupted by something off. The camera likes medium distances that keep the house and its odd angles in view. The lighting tends toward cool interiors and overcast afternoons, which supports the story’s mood of suspended time. Yet the staging of key sequences lacks escalation. A good noir set piece is a ratchet: each beat clicks tighter. In Adulthood, scenes start with tension and then plateau. Dialog stretches past the moment of maximum pressure, and rather than snapping, the tension peters out.
Pacing becomes the enemy. The first act promises an accelerating investigation. The second act meanders from clue to clue without generating fresh urgency or emotional stakes. The third act tries to yank the threads together, but because so many beats have been played for a quick laugh or rushed past, the payoffs feel arbitrary. The movie flirts with farce mechanics, especially as more townspeople drift into the story, yet it never embraces the clockwork precision that farce requires.
Humor: Jokes That Sit On Top Of The Story Instead Of Inside It
Comedies that endure grow their jokes from character and consequence. Meg’s intolerance for nonsense should create a chain of sharp, dry detonations once the body appears. Noah’s inability to keep a secret should drag them into deeper jeopardy. The town’s memory of Patty should collide with present day pretenses and produce comic panic. Adulthood hints at all of this, then settles for riffs and ornament. One can feel a funnier movie just below the surface, where each funny beat also advances the noose of the plot.
There are exceptions. A quietly deranged conversation about whether to call the police or a contractor builds to a mint little punch line because it is rooted in plausible panic. A later moment where the siblings finally say what they remember about Patty plays both as gallows humor and grief. These flashes prove the concept can work. They also underline how often the film reaches for external gags instead of trusting the internal logic of its premise.
Visual Design And Sound: Atmosphere That Outpaces The Story
The production finds a persuasive sense of place: hallways that narrow as secrets expand, a basement that becomes a character, and a suburban street that feels both familiar and faintly hostile. The color palette leans into washed greens and muted browns, which matches the idea of decay beneath domesticity. The score, when it lets a minor key linger, can make a simple pan across a family photo land with dread. These elements do more than their share of lifting. They set a table the screenplay rarely sits down to use.
Themes: What The Film Wants To Say About Growing Up
Adulthood clearly wants to explore how children inherit the consequences of adult choices. The body in the wall is a blunt but potent metaphor: the past literally built into the home. The movie also touches on the way communities rewrite history to preserve comfort, pinning blame where it is most convenient and moving on. There is a tender thread about siblings relearning each other as equals: not the caretaker and the screwup, not the achiever and the comedian, but two adults with partial truths trying to hold a family together.
Those themes surface, then recede. A stronger dramatic spine would have aligned every choice with these questions. Who benefits from silence. What did Meg and Noah see, or fail to see, as kids. How do they forgive their younger selves without absolving real harm. When the story connects to those ideas, the film breathes. When it forgets them in favor of a quick gag or a detour, the air goes out.
Where It Works
A pair of lived in lead performances
Scodelario and Gad carve recognizable, specific people out of familiar archetypes. Their shared history feels real, and that reality nourishes both the quieter jokes and the rawer moments.
A setting that understands suburban noir
The house and neighborhood are not blank backdrops. They carry weight that suggests years of unspoken compromise. This gives the camera something to say even when the dialogue wobbles.
Occasional sequences that find the right register
When the film allows dread to pool and lets the comedy bubble up from denial and logistics, it nails the dark chuckle that great noir comedy can conjure.
Where It Falters
A confused tonal identity
The movie repeatedly chooses the easiest joke over the sharpest one and the quickest resolution over the most revealing one. Suspense rarely accumulates. Humor often dissipates it rather than refracting it.
Structural softness
Key turns arrive without enough setup. Payoffs lack the click of inevitability. The middle act in particular feels like a loop of almosts instead of a climb toward truth.
Underused themes
The symbolic power of the premise is obvious and rich. The film skims it. Deeper focus on memory, culpability, and small town mythmaking could have aligned character, tone, and plot.
Conclusion
Adulthood arrives with a can’t miss hook and a confident sense of place. It boasts two leads who locate flickers of real feeling inside a contrived nightmare. Yet the film hesitates when it should lunge, wisecracks when it should dig, and skims where it should bore down. Noir comedy thrives when laughter and dread are locked in a feedback loop: the situation gets tighter, so the jokes get sharper, which in turn makes the tension feel crueler. Adulthood mostly parks in the middle lane. The skeleton in the wall never becomes the skeleton in the conscience, and the mystery rarely compels enough to justify the detours.
There is a better movie implied by what occasionally works: a wryer, meaner, more humane story about what families bury to stay functional and what it costs to excavate it. In flashes you can see that film. What reaches the screen is a mild curio that mistakes snark for edge and confusion for complexity. A murder story that forgets to thrill is one thing. A comedy that forgets to sharpen is another. When both happen at once, the lights dim but the pulse never quickens. That is the ultimate sin for a suburban noir that promised skeletons: it leaves the audience more curious about the contractor who patched the wall than the secrets sealed inside it.
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