Spin Me Round Serves Up An Amusing but Messy Slice of Dark Comedy: Review
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The Pitch: Amber (Alison Brie) runs the Bakersfield outpost of Tuscany Grove, a popular Olive Garden-adjacent family eatery chain. Great at her job but yearning for something more, Amber gets the opportunity of a lifetime when her boss (Lil Rel Howery) selects her for an all-expenses-paid work retreat to Italy. Amber’s excitement is doubled when her best friend Emily (Ego Nwodim) suggests a tantalizing possibility during her time in Europe: What if she falls in love?
On the trip, she meets a group of other lucky Tuscany Grove managers, including the nosy Deb (Molly Shannon), the arrogant Fran (Tim Heidecker), and the friendly Dana (Zach Woods). Most notably, she’s introduced to Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), the chain’s wealthy, handsome owner.
Nick immediately takes a liking to Amber and, with the help and trusted discretion of his mysterious assistant Kat (Aubrey Plaza), asks Amber to accompany him on his yacht. Reeling from a recent breakup and a failure to launch a business of her own, Amber takes advantage of this opening, hoping this secret romance could yank her out of her existential and professional boredom and lead her to that very thing she longs for.
But as the tryst heats up, Amber catches on that things are not all they seem with Nick. In fact, the whole program and the shady personalities who supervise it reek of suspicious activity. Why is the retreat’s expat organizer Craig (Ben Sinclair) recording everything on his video camera? Why does everyone have to stay at a modest hotel and not at the fancy villa next door? Is everyone really who they say they are? What begins as an idyllic getaway adventure for Amber soon devolves into an unsettling and wayward journey of deception, delusion, and debauchery.
Spin Me Round (IFC Films)
Undercooked and Overbaked: Watching a good movie is often like eating a delicious three-course meal. You have a starter to satisfy some initial cravings, followed by a hearty and juicy dish that hits all the pleasure centers and a sweet treat to top it off. Spin Me Round — Jeff Baena’s fifth directorial effort and his second writing collaboration with star Alison Brie — succeeds in serving a tasty first course in the form of a lightly subversive rom-com, but struggles to craft an entrée and dessert nourishing enough for an overall satisfactory cinematic meal.
In its best and most inspired moments, Spin Me Round is an appealing companion to the trouble-in-paradise dramedy of The White Lotus, with hints of Call Me By Your Name’s lush European escapism. The incredible cast of comedic actors, a remarkable constant in Baena’s oeurve, also brings some prickly humor to balance out the narrative’s paranoid undertones.
But once the mood shifts toward the dark and weird, the film’s aims become less and less clear and its dramatic momentum loses steam, leaving one hungry for something with a little more thematic and emotional bite.
A Promising Appetizer: It would be misleading to say that Spin Me Round’s potential is completely wasted. The film’s first half does contain some genuinely hilarious scenes, anchored by the strong chemistry and comic timing of its talented, attractive ensemble.
These early sequences, where Amber and the other managers are forced to endure Craig’s dull, awkward group exercises and banal Italian cuisine lessons from the restaurant’s menu maker Lizzy (Lauren Weedman), have the feel of a tightly wound workplace sitcom. Everyone seems just as desperate to have fun as Amber, if not more, with some milking the program of its worth in their own specifically selfish ways.
Among the bunch, Heidecker’s obliviously obnoxious reality show chef is a major highlight, the Tim & Eric star fully leaning into the brash dirtbag persona he’s so skilled at playing. Shannon continues to do exemplary later-period work, her performance a delicious elixir of quietly judgmental affectations that echo her characters on I Love That For You and The White Lotus.
High Maintenance’s Sinclair is also a standout as Craig, mining laughs from his equally creepy and snarky demeanor. Even Debby Ryan and Ayden Mayeri make some meat out of their relatively small performances as the amusingly deadpan Susie and the ditzy Jen.
Spin Me Round (IFC Films)
Spin Me Round’s dramatic crux mainly centers around the morally thorny dynamic between Brie and Nivola, the latter of whom skillfully alternates between charming and menacing and pathetic. However, the movie’s biggest sell is Plaza. For anyone who was enamored by the Parks and Recreation alum’s beguiling and objectively hot turn as the deserved love interest in Happiest Season or her striking venture into psychodrama with Black Bear, you’re in luck.
Here, Plaza sinks her teeth into yet another spiky and nimble performance as Kat, dialing into her character’s enigmatic and seductive coolness with aplomb. She’s especially fun to watch when sharing scenes with Brie, who remains one of the most underrated actresses working today and whose return to the silver screen is a welcome relief following the untimely cancellation of Netflix’s GLOW in 2020.
Kat helps clue Amber and the audience into Nick’s whole deal while sharing some disdain for facilitating Nick’s sexual exploits, despite her being very good at it. She also seems to relish spending quality time with Amber; the two end up at one point frequenting a smoky Italian club, an expensive dress shop, and a hole-in-the-wall restaurant like a grown-up, subtly queer Lizzy McGuire Movie.
A Paltry Spread: It’s a shame, then, that right as Spin Me Round starts to get interesting, it also begins to fall apart. After Nick invites Amber to an extravagant, vaguely cultish party, a predictable but nevertheless intriguing second act twist is revealed, teasing some transgressive psychosexual subtext in the vein of Eyes Wide Shut and Suspiria. But with every new development following the twist, there’s very little payoff and an increasing lack of focus in what the narrative is trying to accomplish.
Even as the plot spins into chaos and absurdity, that once promising build-up of suspense gradually dries out. Characters who started out as quirky caricatures grow more unhinged and grating (a recurring gag involving Deb wearing ostentatious outfits to the group gatherings instead of the required chef garb starts out funny, but quickly becomes very one-note.)
Amber’s work to figure out Tuscany Grove’s ulterior motives makes for sometimes entertainingly silly but mostly puzzling and inert passages, eventually culminating in a rushed, bizarre climax that includes a half-baked explanation for all the hush-hush happenings behind the scenes.
Ironically enough, Amber’s disillusionment with Nick and the luxurious backdrop against their initially steamy affair mirrors this critic’s own disappointment with the path Spin Me Round decided to take. As the film reaches its conclusion, it seems that the finale needed a more complex foundation underneath the surface for its impact to fully resonate. In the end, though, the conflicts at the heart of Spin Me Round feel so slight, the extreme situations not quite as extreme as they’re made out to be, that the gestures toward provocation are empty.
The Verdict: As its poster’s parody of romance novel covers seems to indicate, Spin Me Round shows how our fantasies can never truly align with our reality, though the yearning for a more adventurous life is probably better than the actual pursuit of such a dream. The Italian getaway is enticing in theory, but it can also be just as unpredictable as the Italian food at Tuscany Grove is mass-produced.
It’s unfortunate that Spin Me Round isn’t as ambitious as it should be in trying to create a meal out of that premise, and even when it does try to exercise some ambition, it takes too long to get there.
The film wants to be many things — a satirical rom-com, a psychosexual thriller, a gently probing commentary on sexual and gender politics in the workplace — but ultimately, it squanders the impressive strength of its cast, remains too timid in exploring its ideas, and makes too many odd story choices in its second half to justify its attempts at genre fluidity. It may have a few compelling ingredients, but it could have certainly added some more flavor into the mix to really give it the kick it needed.
Where to Watch: Spin Me Round gets delivered to theaters and VOD services on August 19th.
Trailer:
Spin Me Round Serves Up An Amusing but Messy Slice of Dark Comedy: Review
Sam Rosenberg
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