Everybody wants rom-coms to have a renaissance, but nobody seems to know how they should evolve to reflect the realities of the modern world. Few of the recent efforts to resurrect the form have been meaningfully successful, and most of those rare successes have used hot new stars to hide their reliance on dusty old tropes; no shade to the breezy appeal of “Anyone but You,” but no one would accuse that Shakespeare-inspired charmer of trying to move the genre forward.
The prevailing wisdom is that the unfettered wish fulfillment of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” (or whatever) is a poor fit for the messiness of the digital age, even if it really had more to do with the fact that social media has made it hard to write a decent meet-cute, and the streaming boom gave Hollywood studios an excuse to stop trying. But wish fulfillment was always just a means to get audiences in the theater and send them home happy. The truth is that messiness itself —within certain, easily resolved parameters — was always the very thing that rom-coms did best.
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So far as Chad Hartigan’s “The Threesome” is concerned, it’s also the best reason to bring them back. A very 21st century movie that does what it can to pretend that iPhones don’t exist, this winsome story of a hook-up gone horribly wrong —or fatefully right!? —compensates for avoiding the internet of it all by doubling down on the chaos and confusion that it’s sown into the dating scene. Tripling down, even.
More agreeably comedic than laugh-out-loud funny (it errs closer toward dramedy than rom-com, and only gets away with that because its characters are so aggressively resistant of labels), “The Threesome” would appear to be a classic tale of a friend crush that blossoms into something more serious after a drunken night out. “The Little Mermaid” breakout Jonah Hauer-King plays Connor, a curly-haired puppy dog of a manboy who understandably can’t help but pine after the single coolest — and coolest single — 30-year-old girl in all of Little Rock. Her name is Olivia (Zoey Deutch, fortifying her status as Gen Z’s rom-com queen), she has a caustic sense of humor, and she once jerked off to Billy Joel. More relevantly, she also had casual sex with Connor at some point in the not too distant past, but you can tell from the way his eyes follow her around a room that it wasn’t so casual for a hopeless romantic like him. While it doesn’t seem like these two have a ton of shared history together, Ethan Ogilby’s impressively dexterous original screenplay leans into convention enough to suggest that it’s only a matter of time before they will.
Cut to: A fun night at the clurrbbb, where the photogenic friends dance the night away with the cute Mary Elizabeth Winstead look-alike they met by chance earlier that evening. Her name is Jenny (“Bottoms” actress Ruby Cruz, delightful in a performance that’s fantastic at playing innocent without ever tipping over into naive), she’s a younger grad student who doesn’t seem to have any friends over her own, and she doesn’t say no when Olivia insists they all go back to her place. Nor does she blanche at the suggestion of Truth or Dare, a game that has never once in history been played without an ulterior motive. Needless to say, everyone wins.
However you might expect a sweet and buoyant movie called “The Threesome” to unfold from there, that’s not the way things go this time around. Connor doesn’t fall in love with both women, they don’t fall in love with each other… the story that Hartigan and Ogilby are interested in spinning out of that premise —“that premise” being “what if three attractive people had sex together” —doesn’t really fit the dimensions of a love triangle or a romantic entanglement of any other clearly definable shape.
For one thing, there’s no ambiguity to the fact that Connor wants Olivia and Olivia only. For another, things between all three of these people are about to get a lot messier than anyone would ever be able to trace with a stencil. I don’t want to give too much away (though it’s a credit to the film that I actually do want to give too much away), but it’s safe to assume that the events of that one magical night will reverberate for a long time to come. And that you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a little bit if you hope to have a good time surfing on the shockwaves.
Of course, realism has always been a fungible concept when it comes to a romantic comedy, whether you’re talking about the story of a lifetime falling into Gregory Peck’s lap in “Roman Holiday,” or Josh Hartnett going 40 days — and 40 nights! —without an orgasm in a movie whose title is escaping me at the moment. But “The Threesome” wears its genre trappings a lot more lightly than most films like it (you can see it in Sing Howe Yam’s cinematography, which trades the usual gloss for a more delicate indie sheen), and its various twists of fate can seem a bit more contrived than they might in a more fanciful rom-com-like thing.
Such things might threaten to upend a less complicated movie, but “The Threesome” — as precariously balanced along the border between genres as it is along the fine line between one phase of life and another — uses them to reflect the uncertain geometry of modern adulthood. Early in the story, before a certain friction develops between them, Olivia assures Jenny that she has “plenty of time to find her people,” but the events that transpire from there have a funny way of suggesting that none of these characters have all that much time left to find themselves. Not on their own terms, anyway. The world has never been as freeform and unsettled as it is today, and a film like “The Threesome” is so refreshing because of how honestly it leverages classic genre strictures to find the personal opportunity in that.
Heavy as things get, Hartigan and his cast never forget that all of the characters in a movie like this are always clinging to fear as they fumble towards happiness, and “The Threesome” keeps the rom-com of it all cooking on the backburner even when the action in the foreground seems more in line with a melodrama. Jaboukie Young-White gives top-notch gay best friend as Connor’s —wait for it — gay best friend, Deutch is raw and prickly enough to deliver scorching one-liners in the middle of even the most intense confrontations, and Hauer-King fulfills the genre requirements by playing a square-jawed white boy whose dimples are deeper than any part of his character. The actor’s performance would have benefited from a lighter touch, as even the silliest jokes he makes are freighted with simpering anxiety, but Connor is believable enough as a guileless himbo with a fear of abandonment, and Deutch and Cruz each have enough charisma to power an entire movie on their own.
Hartigan doesn’t force them to. He offers them plenty of support just by inviting them to follow traditional character arcs that have been twisted into something more like a maze. The nowness of it all is more organic than overbearing (it manifests itself in everything from a pointed Elon Musk reference to a plot detail that hinges on recent changes to certain laws, even if the premise is inextricably rooted in a bedrock of conservatism), and the love —or at least the desire for it — burning away at the film’s center is classic enough that even the film’s ostensibly unconventional ending feels like coming home. “The Threesome” doesn’t always feel like what you might think of when you imagine a “modern” rom-com, but that’s what makes this one of the rare movies that actually fits the bill.
Grade: B
“The Threesome” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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