Chad Hartigan’s “The Threesome” is more about “the consequences” than the fun-loving title may suggest. After running into his former coworker/forever crush at a wedding, Connor (Jonah Hauer-King) wants nothing more than another chance at love with waitress Olivia (Zoey Deutch). Her impulsive nature ignores him at first, until, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Greg (Jaboukie Young-White), he chats up a lonely girl who’s been stood up by a date. Intrigued, Olivia joins Connor and Jenny (Ruby Cruz) at their table, and before long, sexual tension brings them back to someone’s apartment, where a good time happens (but fades to black before anything too hot and heavy ends up on screen). Weeks later, both Olivia and Jenny have some pretty life-changing news: they are now both pregnant. While Connor tries to step up to help both women with their pregnancies, he’s caught between his uneven affections for Olivia and Jenny lying to her family about their relationship.
“The Threesome” ends up kind of a mixed bag, cute but a bit disjointed. Written by Ethan Ogilby, the movie ends up being much more dramatic than where its romantic comedy story originally begins. There also seems to be a hint of sex shaming to the whole affair that taps into the idea that premarital sex comes with unintended, life-changing consequences. None of the characters feel particularly well-written, just pretty surface-level nice in Connor’s case and impulsive for Olivia. Since they are mostly the film’s central couple, it does make their story feel rather drawn out to see the cycle repeat itself over and over again: Connor tries to do the right thing, Olivia freaks out, and changes her mind. Whether that’s to get an abortion or not or run back to a married lover, Olivia’s flighty schtick becomes rather uninteresting the more times she backtracks and predictably changes course. Connor’s character is written to be so much of a nice guy that Hauer-King struggles to make much of an impression on screen.
Strangely enough, Jenny has somewhat of a deeper plot in the story, as she struggles with her faith, her desires, and her religious family, who disapprove of her current condition but stand by her throughout the ordeal. To soothe their disappointment, she tries to pass off Connor as her serious boyfriend, but he is in the process of trying to make things work out with Olivia. That tension livens up the stakes in the movie and sets the stage for a bit more levity, as Connor now has to keep up Jenny’s lies to save face. His friend Greg also revels in this conflict between religious beliefs and Jenny’s personality, joking with her in the car about her sexual past and navigating her family’s baby shower with Connor as he fumbles through answering questions about which church he volunteers at.
Despite its rocky narrative, Deutch and Cruz make the best out of their character’s situations. Deutch leans into her character’s erratic nature with intense reactions and tender moments of vulnerability. Olivia blows things up, then feels remorse for the hurt it causes, and Deutch’s performance captures that volatility with a sense of empathy for her character’s confusion. Cruz fashions Jenny as a nice girl with secrets of her own, a conflicted character who both knows and does not know what she actually wants. Her performance is much more subdued compared to Deutch’s but their characters wrestle with many of the same problems they don’t have easy solutions for. Between these two dynamic performances, Hauer-King’s just nice performance is just that: nice. Not thrilling, but nice. For some reason, the movie does give him a moment to shine as a singer while Deutch’s character struggles to build a crib on her own. It’s just one of many off-key decisions Hartigan makes that add to the movie’s uneven tone. Is it silly enough to include a trumpet player playing the “womp-womp” sound as a cutaway joke, but serious enough to make room for intense dramatic close-ups of its characters?
