I Don’t Understand You, directed and written by married couple Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig, continually cashes in on the promise of its title. Centered on a couple’s vacation in Italy as they prepare to adopt a child, with the pair then facing an increasingly wild array of problems after their car gets stuck in a ditch in the countryside, the film’s continuously escalating conflicts center on both their catastrophic inability to speak Italian and, on a smaller scale, miscommunications about their relationship. Craig noted that the film’s genre inspirations were 2010s mumblecore and late-20th-century “ballistically crazy” popcorn films like Death Becomes Her, and the film’s slippage between slight domestic misunderstandings and cartoonish acts of violence bears both of these influences in mind. Propelled by charismatic and broadly funny, yet also ultimately grounding, performances from Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll, I Don’t Understand You is an entertaining exercise in genre slippage.
Rannells and Kroll play married couple Cole and Dom, who — as exemplified by their witty banter and near-excessive use of terms of endearment — have a loving and comfortable relationship, though their bond has lately been tested by a sustained struggle to adopt a child. While on an anniversary vacation in Italy, they receive a call from a birth mother they’ve connected with (Amanda Seyfried, gamely playing a secondary role) informing them that they’ll officially be the parents of her child. This slim series of events comprises approximately the first third of the film, and they unfold at a leisurely, pleasantly watchable pace. Crano and Craig particularly center on how Cole and Dom communicate — sometimes talking things through to excess, sometimes holding back what they really think — and Rannells and Kroll imbue their scenes with a light humor and a plausible intimacy.
The low-stakes indie stylings of this portion of the film, though, are immediately disrupted once their car gets stuck on a back road on the way to a rural restaurant. From this point, everything that can go wrong does: they have no cell service, they get rained on, and an old farmer who only speaks Italian is enraged to find them on his private property. While he does drop them off at the restaurant, it turns out to simply be the home of an eccentric elderly woman, Zia Luciana (Nunzia Schiano). A sudden power outage causes a tumult that — without revealing the film’s key twist — leaves Cole and Dom in a highly compromised position, made worse when a series of family members start popping in at the house. Desperate to come home to their baby, and almost always misunderstanding the motivations of the Italians who they largely can’t comprehend, Cole and Dom resort to a series of flippant, violent acts, ratcheting the film to the level of gonzo horror-comedy and complicating how we understand these characters who had initially been drawn as sympathetic.
The turns the plot takes in the film’s back half are excessive and ridiculous by design, and it’s to the credit of Crano and Craig that the film doesn’t become grating as a result. Commencing from the more relaxed starting point, the directors build up the tension and conflict by degrees with every new misfortune or strange occurrence, and they adjust the rhythm and pacing of the film accordingly, arriving at a frenzied fever pitch by the climax. Because of the directors’ control over tone and tempo, by the time characters are wielding axes and getting stabbed, it feels like a natural — if extreme — progression, rather than an abrupt turn.
What ultimately makes the chaotic dark comedy of I Don’t Understand You so effective, in addition to Rannells and Kroll’s sharp comedic performances, is how Crano and Craig keep such a consistent focus on Cole and Dom’s singular goal to adopt a child. It’s the basis of a standard-issue domestic drama, yet Crano and Craig stretch this desire for parenthood as far as it can go, placing their protagonists in situations where they believe they must be violent and destructive in order to go back home and raise their long-awaited child. Their commitment to one another and to starting a family, despite the problems of communication inherent in every relationship, seems genuinely earnest and sweet in the film’s first act. Yet as I Don’t Understand You progresses, this familial commitment becomes deranged, their actions revealing that they’ll treat anyone who stands in their way as dispensable. While constantly mining comedy from miscommunication and out-of-balance priorities, Crano and Craig develop a deceptively critical film, suggesting that no matter how mellow and amiable they may seem, the privileged among us will always place their needs over the dignity of others.
DIRECTOR: Brian Crano & David Joseph Craig; CAST: Andrew Rannells, Nick Kroll, Amanda Seyfried, Morgan Spector; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: June 6; STREAMING: June 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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