Critics reviews

Radwanski’s film... greatly benefits from its warmth and breezy charm... Even at a briskly paced 80 minutes, Matt & Mara manages to be remarkably astute about its central relationship’s cocktail of suppressed desire and professional envy.

[Matt and Mara] is an itchy, unsettled and often poignant relationship drama, consistent with his previous works not just in shared personnel... but in a tingly, seasick storytelling sensibility that makes something volatile and cinematic out of ostensibly static material.

Matt and Mara takes a similarly loose and free-wheeling approach [to Radwanski's previous film, Anne at 13,000 ft] that owes a debt to the angular naturalism of the early 2000s mumblecore movement... [The director] uses restless, handheld cameras and improvisation to capture micro-moments in which not a lot happens but the implications are huge.

A toothless, aimless dramedy... a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.

Some viewers may find themselves frustrated with the film’s hesitancy to provide a conclusion, but [Matt and Mara] doesn’t set out to answer its own questions — it merely asks them within the context of the millennial experience. It leaves the audience with a longing to keep turning the pages of an unfinished story, which feels like an entirely appropriate reflection of its themes

Matt and Mara may ultimately remain somewhat elusive, keeping its answers and contradictions unresolved and unknowable. But in this way, the film is also deeply resonant and relatable to anyone who’s had a friendship that in a different time and different place might’ve meant something more, one that remains so meaningful that it’s kept on the shelf.

A nebulous bid to capture the tension between a seemingly cozy marriage and a romantic fling, and between the academy and the outside world, “Matt and Mara” is less a movie than an idea for one. It doesn’t help that neither character is likable, or that the director and writer, Kazik Radwanski, fills the screen with close-ups in lieu of information.

Matt and Mara’s finely tuned drama, breezily natural dialogue, and complimentary performers make for one of the best films of the year. It’s a refreshing change of pace from Radwanski, whose previous features delved deep into the headspaces of characters with much less enviable lives and more anxious sensibilities.

[A] sharply engaging indie drama... Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature... Campbell and Johnson write entire biographies for their characters through casual dialogue exchanges alone, even though few of these moments center on reminiscing and revealing specific details about their past.

[Matt and Mara] offers no easy answer for [its leads'] situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden. Just as a poem can transform with a slight change of intonation, so does this fractaled love that lives in Mara, as it lives in all of us.

Radwanski’s charming, well-observed dialogue reflects the experience of plenty of elder millennials... [while Campbell and Johnson] have an easy chemistry together... The naturalistic camerawork and performances ground the film in realism, creating a wry dramedy that refuses to placate us with easy answers or condescension.

Matt and Mara is one of those films in which very little concrete happens, but the tingling possibility that something might makes it compelling. The appeal is largely due to the casting – Cambell and Johnson have an undeniable chemistry that is magnified by the improvisational freedom of the picture’s approach.