Couples Weekend review – Alexandra Daddario annd Josh Gad lead spicy comedy of marital melee

Two couples start to fall apart during a midwinter break, involving a lot of shouty dialogue that’s neither realistic nor funny

The interesting premise in this laborious and dispiriting relationship dramedy sadly leads nowhere; all we get is strained shouty dialogue and mugging performances in a film which succeeds neither in being funny or realistic.

Alexandra Daddario (from TV’s The White Lotus) is Debs, a book editor with dreams of being an author herself; her platonic best pal from college is Mitch (Josh Gad), a schlubby guy climbing the ladder in investment banking, and maybe nursing feelings for Debs he can never admit. They go to a cosy, picturesque woodland cabin for New Year’s with their respective partners; Debs is with hunky nature photographer Josh (Daveed Diggs) and Mitch is with Melanie (Ashley Park), uptight author of a bestselling cookbook called Emotional Eating (a good title, actually).

All four, in their various ways, are nervously preoccupied with their career prestige and Mitch in particular thinks Melanie is basically out of his league and he’s lucked out. But returning from a walk one morning through the snowy landscape, Debs and Mitch look through the cabin window and see Josh and Melanie having sex. Debs furiously intends to storm in there and confront them, but whiny, spineless Mitch thinks they should wait – ostensibly to process the information, but actually because he doesn’t want to blow up his life and clearly thinks that with a little effort he (and Debs) could and should go into denial about the whole thing.

That approach can’t last long and it leads to a great deal of strenuous, uninteresting yelling and sobbing, although the later honesty-breakthrough moment, fuelled by the discovery of the cabin’s moonshine stash, is at least marginally relaxing. It is maybe unfortunate that this film arrives in the UK at the same moment as Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, which shows how a spicy couples comedy can really work. This film abandons its initial promising idea and there is no compensatory insight or fun.

• Couples Weekend is on digital platforms from 13 July.