Critics reviews

It’s a quiet movie, very much of the American Indie idiom from a few years back, and certainly will not be to everyone’s taste. Still, given the committed performances and inherent believability of every geeky moment, there’s much to admire.

The main issue with The Adults is not that it doesn’t have an interesting concept, but that it doesn’t do enough with it to justify its general abrasiveness... The repetitive structure Defa employs, which intensifies but does not vary the core dynamic, results in character behavior that isn’t productively obscure so much as incoherent.

For the most part, Defa effectively balances the potentially excessive charm of [the film's goofier] moments with the resentful barbs that Eric and Rachel exchange in scenes shot through with a certain cringe-comic tension, and the no-frills intrigue that he builds around Cera’s ambiguous character.

And beneath all those layers of performance and unspoken trauma, this at-times-excruciating, at-times-hilarious film finds a beating heart... It’s coarse to the touch but The Adults is a tender film.

“The Adults” is an emotional scream transposed through low-decibel vocal fry — an endearing sibling drama full of cringe comedy that lands a miraculous, unexpectedly poignant ending, seemingly out of nowhere.

While Dustin Guy Defa doesn’t entirely break new ground with downbeat comedy-drama The Adults, he sets an engagingly off-kilter tone with a poignant work that occupies a dramatic space somewhere between Kenneth Lonergan and Whit Stillman.

Dustin Guy Defa’s determinedly quiet family-reunion drama seeks to be discomfiting, gradually giving the viewer that hollow, lurching, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that either precedes a dreaded encounter or follows a disappointing one. That might not sounds like a good thing, but in the context of this small, expansively sad film, it is one.

Anchored by its competent trio of protagonists, “The Adults” would have been a lovely time if not for the overused mishmash of twee gimmicks, as nagging to watch now as a relentlessly annoying three-year-old brother.