I Don’t Understand You will release in theaters nationwide on June 6.
By Jack Faivish
I Don’t Understand You centers on a gay couple, Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells) attempting to adopt a child, an inherently emotional and potentially meaningful premise. But rather than exploring this with any depth or cohesion, the film abruptly swerves into a vacation-in-Italy subplot that feels not only disconnected, but completely at odds with the adoption storyline. It’s a tonal pivot so jarring, it feels like you’ve walked into another film entirely. We’re told this is where the comedy is supposed to kick in, but unfortunately it doesn’t.
Kroll, usually good for at least a handful of sharp lines, seems checked out. The script gives him and Rannells almost nothing to work with. The dialogue limps along, punchlines fall flat, and the pacing drags. It’s the kind of comedy that feels like it was written on the assumption that the concept alone would carry the laughs.
Then comes the film’s big twist: while lost in Italy, the couple accidentally kills a woman — knocking her down a flight of stairs in what’s staged like physical comedy. From there, the chaos only escalates. Her son, Giovani, later confronts them and says “you’re dad!” having just seen a message on their phone revealing they’ve been approved to adopt. But the couple, riddled with guilt, mishear it as “you’re dead!” and assume he’s discovered the truth about his mother’s death and is threatening them. He isn’t. He has no idea. Yet they kill him thinking it’s in self-defense.
This misunderstanding leads to a sequence where the couple chases his fiancée, thinking they need to silence her too, ultimately hitting and killing her with their car. The film plays all of this as farce, hinging it on a language mix-up (“You’re dad” / “You’re dead”) that’s meant to be clever. But it’s not clever, it’s lazy. It’s the one thread trying to tie together two completely incompatible storylines: an anxious, heartfelt adoption arc and a slapstick accidental murder spree.
The subject matter of accidentally killing an entire family and trying to cover it up could theoretically work as dark comedy in the hands of a clever, self-aware script with the courage to go fully absurd or biting. Here, it’s just tone-deaf. There’s no satire, insight, payoff. Just a series of bizarrely grim events played for laughs that never come.
Amanda Seyfried appears sporadically over FaceTime as the birth mother, Candace, and then finally in person in the last scene. But by then, any emotional resonance the film hoped to land has long since evaporated. Her character, like most of the film, feels underused and underwritten.
I’ll avoid more spoilers, but there is a final attempt at closure for Dom and Cole with a gesture that might have felt poignant or tragically ironic but comes off, again, as just weird. Maybe if the film had been funny we could give it the benefit of the doubt and read its absurdity as allegory. Without humor, all that’s left is discomfort.
I Don’t Understand You wants to be dark, heartfelt, and hilarious. But it doesn’t understand how to be any of those things. The result is a film that feels confused. The title, unfortunately, says it all.
I give I Don’t Understand You a C-.
TV and City 