CinemaSerf
3/2/2025
The mild-mannered “Josh” (Ben Foster), his wife “Rachel” (Cobie Smulders) and their son “Max” (William Kosovic) have a brand new home and are looking forward to settling in when there is a car accident outside and a tyre comes a-bouncing through their window at a seriously inopportune moment! Needless to say they are a bit flustered and she thinks maybe they ought to move. Well when it happens again, you’d think that’d be a bit of a no-brainer but he is somehow captivated. Not by the accidents, but by the time it takes the emergency services to arrive, and so he decides to do some training to be able to help out. Of course, his wife and young son are perplexed by his increasingly odd behaviour, as is his boss, and so there’s soon a lot on the line for the man. I enjoyed the start of this, and I thought this might be Foster’s best performance, but after about half an hour it became a rather joyless exhibition of obsessiveness and selfishness topped off by a truly far-fetched, though sometimes darkly comedic, desire to do good. Smulders does fine, but only features sparingly - which is just as well for given her character is supposed to be a couples therapist, “Rachel” shows a complete lack of appreciation of her husband’s trauma and of their son’s needs that is ultimately annoyingly breathtaking. Sadly, the initially good idea just turns into a series of overly contrived bad decisions stitched together with an implausible series of incidents that rushed through some universally unlikeable and undercooked characterisations and left me wanting more - or less. Sorry.
