Netflix’s Good Grief is a stylish if slightly wooden debut by Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy

Dan Levy and Luke Evans in Good Grief, which released on Netflix on January 5. (Screen grab/YouTube/Netflix)

“It’s like an ulcer right here that never goes away,” Marc, the grieving husband of a man who has recently died, says to his friend in Netflix’s Good Grief. It’s a tense moment, punctuated by overlapping and contradicting threads of attention, self-concern and empathy. These are friends who, though they speak incredibly politely and considerately about life, find themselves adrift wavelengths they would be expected to read.

Written and directed by Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy, Good Grief just about extends its title. It’s a story about a grieving man learning to navigate the afterlife of a relationship he begins to see differently in the rear-view mirror. Like life, the film argues, it takes the warm shoulders of friendship to not just deal with loss but also put it into a wider, more humbling perspective.

Levy plays Marc, a self-conscious artist living out of London. On Christmas night, his writer husband played charmingly by Luke Evans meets a fatal accident. Because the milieu is so upper-class and bourgeoisie, people in this film speak like they are reading from Buddhist scriptures. There are reflections on loss that feel a bit on the nose, as if the characters are far too self-aware of the kind of film they should be performing as opposed to the story they should be living. Some of the dialogue, therefore, can come across as corny. But then Levy doesn’t retract from the fact that this is a film set amidst people with eerily conventional methods of articulating, ominously well, what they feel. The diction definitely isn’t the problem.

Marc has two friends in Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel). The three embark on a trip to Paris, where secrets about Marc’s not-so-simple marriage begin to tumble out of the weedy, unspecific echo that is loss. Patel is particularly affecting as Marc’s former lover who has stuck around, but also someone who feels unseen and lonely despite being ever-present. The chemistry between the three is palpable, and so is the vein of tension that hides underneath the bland, unremarkable etiquette this group of friends operates by. They don’t frequent loud discotheques or saddle blazing parties. They instead do the quieter stuff like talk, take casual walks and ruminate over gondola rides.

It’s refreshing to see a writer turn the road-trip-to-recovery film on its head a bit. We don’t get fleeting images of a sizzling Paris, exquisite imagery washing over the cracks of a fractured dynamic. Instead, we are offered the bottled-up angst of grown men and women trying to make sense of the world within walled spaces. There is a sequence when an impromptu guest at their Paris apartment forces the three friends to reconsider all that they haven’t ever said or expressed out loud. Maybe catharsis can only really be achieved through anger. It’s moving and unsettling and held back from turning into a pageant of poignancy.

Levy’s direction is stylish, his performance likeably soft and familiar and yet the film suffers from this disappointing sense of prestige. It can behave like a bunch of people trying to tell viewers how loss ought to be processed as opposed to exhibiting how it is experienced. The screenplay can feel clunky, with sequences bumping into one another, their rhythm often disrupted by the need to gargle the film’s manifesto into sight. To which effect this can also feel like a film that makes it a point to remind the audience of how it should be viewed and heard.

There is a lot to like about Good Grief, especially its subversion of mainstream friendships. Contrary to the peripheral figure he has played in cinema until now, a gay man’s grief takes centre stage. Moreover, he is surrounded not by worldly-wise friends with access to the seizing-the-day guts but people who are equally wounded, stricken or suffering, waiting for that one moment of catharsis to actually crumble into confession. It’s a raw but stylish debut by a writing voice we know from the eccentric but path-breaking Schitt’s Creek, that will certainly go onto do better things.

Dan Levy is quickly becoming the face of bittersweet benevolence, the kind of well-mannered school of acting that relies heavily on the meaning and tone of the word being uttered. No wonder then that his first films feels a tad overwritten, as if to compensate for the muted tone of the rest of the cast. It wants to literally say, that which its shackled actors can’t communicate through their bodies or eyes. Grief here can be seen, sensed but never quite felt in the way that experienced directors manage to pull off. That said, it’s still a watchable, lightly specked film about dragging yourself through a world of hurt and pain. It both helps and complicates, the film says, to do it alongside friends.

Good Grief is now streaming on Netflix.