The Parenting (now streaming on Max) is a ridiculous horror-comedy featuring an unlikely cast of veteran heavy hitters, including Edie Falco, Brian Cox, Dean Norris and Lisa Kudrow, and does Parker Posey count? If Kudrow does, then yeah, she does. Anyway, the first four play the parents to a couple who gathered their respective genetic forerunners together for a long weekend in a spacious AirBnB, so they can all meet for the first time. Very sweet, sure, next step in a serious relationship and all that, very nice – until they realize the place is haunted by a malcontent supernatural being setting its sights on some fresh souls, which doesn’t strike me as being as fun or pleasant a bonding experience as, I dunno, a bottle of wine, dinner and a game of charades. So it goes?
The Gist: The movie never tells us where this awesome rental is located, but I’m labeling it Red Flag City. It’s a big, beautiful old house (ding) in a remote area (ding ding) with a price that’s too good to be true (ding ding ding) and the caretaker is a flighty goofball played by Parker Posey in a series of ridiculous wigs (ding ding ding ding ding ding ding!). But we’re also privy to some dramatic irony: The cold open, set in that very same house on the fateful day of the M*A*S*H finale in 1983, depicts the family that lived there – the family that eats catalina dressing and wears Reeboks for the sake of era-specific flavor – losing their lives in a very sudden and violent manner at the hands of a nasty demonic entity. Tragic. ’Twould be a shame if such a thing happened again!
Now, the present day. Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) have been together for a while now. They’re serious. They have a dog, which is definitely a step. Rohan also has a ring in his pocket, and intends to pop the question while both their parents watch and hopefully approve of everything, etc. Big weekend. They get to the big, beautiful old house in a remote area with a price that’s too good to be true and meet the caretaker who’s a flighty goofball played by Parker Posey, whose name is Brenda. One scene with her in it and you’ll realize the doorbell isn’t the only dingdong around here. As Rohan and Josh unpack, the notice Brenda seems to be drawing a circle around the house with a big stick, and she says she’s “measuring for a sprinkler system.” CURIOUS.
Their parents arrive and, this being a silly lark of a comedy, they’re all at least a little bit insane. Rohan is the adopted product of Sharon (Falco), who’s a little stern and high-strung, and Frank (Cox), who has the slightly bewildered visage of someone who’s lived for many years with someone who’s a little stern and high-strung. Josh’s parents are more salt-of-the-earth – Liddy (Kudrow) and Cliff (Norris) are flannel shirt-wearers who seem to have worked with their hands more than their counterparts across the dinner table, and they also have three Pomeranian yippers, so they’re crazy dog people. There’s a little tension about Josh’s work situation – he purposely got fired from an REI store so he could work on his songwriting – and everyone’s a bit awkward and nervous and there’s a dumb gag where Josh tries to calm his nerves by chowing on too many weed gummies. Does any of this matter once Pazuzu’s cousin emerges from the shadows of the basement looking for a new possessee? Not in the slightest.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Meet the Parents + the scenes in Scary Movie 2 that parody The Exorcist + a budget slightly bigger than an episode of Into the Dark = The Parenting.
Performance Worth Watching: Cox enjoys a scene or three of inspired lunacy – and a scene or two of humiliation that some may deem upsetting, considering his high-gravitas pedigree – but Posey ultimately inspires more laughs, making the most of her limited screen time.
Memorable Dialogue: A rather untoward (and eyebrowless) Cox doppelganger (Coxxelganger?) manifests alongside Regular Cox:
Regular Cox: Jesus Christ!
Evil Cox: Jesus who? Not familiar! HAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond a few verbal references and some thumping noises.
Our Take: Problem is, those thumping noises aren’t scrumping noises – they’re things-that-go-bumping-in-the-night noises, although our three couples all think one of the other couples in the house is rocking the Casbah. The gag is mostly representative of The Parenting in that it comes right up to the precipice of funny, but never quite gets there. The screenplay, by longtime SNL writer Kent Sublette, doesn’t offer anything particularly inspired or original, leaving the burden of entertaining us to the cast, among whom there’s no lack of talent whatsoever. So it leaves Kudrow hitting the deadpan with a big wooden spoon (frankly, she looks bored), and strips Cox down to his bare ass and has him projectile-spewing ungodly amounts of steaming-hot mixed-noodle-casserole vom, thankfully not at the same time. And here I must note that making sure Cox is wearing jammies while he firehoses barf is not an adequate means of maintaining the stalwart thespian’s dignity.
The movie’s mixed-bagginess manifests in Flynn and Dodani’s energetic attempts to sell the material, contrasted by Cox’s game performance (you can’t say he’s a true pro, and a good sport) and occasional bits of spiky comedy from Falco and Norris. It’s almost as if director Craig Johnson (The Skeleton Twins) knows the script’s chemical formulations are off, so he tosses in Vivan Bang as a wild card, the wacky bestie who arrives mid-haunting to try to spice things up a little, which, again, almost works, but not quite.
The primary issue here is the material’s lumpy-mashed-potatoes consistency; it struggles to make the best use of its superlative supporting cast’s penchant for character comedy, and never fully integrates them into a looks-good-on-paper/tough-to-execute-in-reality melange of grossout humor and tingly terror. The legitimate laughs stem from the smarter comedy bits, the product of a smart cast. The horror, however, primarily consists of Cox wearing sinister prosthetics, or characters sitting in dim-lit rooms waiting for a jump scare to happen. And then the third act shoehorns in some sentimental stuff, apparently so the movie isn’t a total lark. Frankly, The Parenting might’ve been a better movie if it was a total lark.
Our Call: If The Parenting knew its own strengths and leaned into them confidently, it might’ve been funnier, and a better use of all that talent. But as it stands, it’s a dysfunctional mishmash of stuff that makes us laugh in fits and starts, which isn’t often enough. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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