It’s always disappointing when a film has an interesting premise, but its execution fails to live up to the ideas it puts forth. Such is the case of “You, Me & Her,” from husband-and-wife filmmakers Dan Levy Dagerman, who directs with too obvious a hand, and screenwriter Selina Ringel, whose script raises interesting questions about intimacy and open relationships, but fails to follow through on any real exploration.
Ringel stars as Mags, a working mom whose business prowess is often undermined by her father (Hernán Mendoza), with whom she owns a private equity firm. Her husband Ash (Ritesh Rajan) doesn’t help much either, often shirking his stay-at-home dad duties while trying to get his boutique weed business off the ground. The duo have been together since college, but have lost whatever it was that first drew them to each other. They can’t be in the same room without bickering about something. Some of this tension is clearly meant to be linked to their roles as new parents, but a live-in nanny appears to do most of the parenting, and more often than not, the film almost seems to forget that they even have a child.
In an attempt to recharge their spark, the two head to a resort in Mexico, where Ash has supposedly taken care of all the details. He has, in fact, not taken care of much beyond booking them a fancy room. Ash plays it by ear for every meal and romantic excursion, but not in a romantic way, just careless and haphazard. He spends more effort trying to score some Mexican weed than he does reconnecting with his wife, much to her chagrin. Things change when the two are taken to a nightclub by a couple of swingers. The thought of switching up partners seems to titillate both Mags and Ash, though neither of them act on it.
That is until Mags meets Angela (Sydney Park), a self-styled “digital nomad” yoga instructor whose attraction to Mags is pronounced as a four-alarm fire. Mags begins to loosen up with Angela, giving into a yearning same-sex attraction that she has buried since college. Here’s where the film takes its first big misstep. Rather than explore why Mags has repressed these desires for so long, the film instead becomes a farce where Mags and Ash see Angela as a unicorn for their threesome fantasy. Every time they fail to secure the bag, they get so turned on they reconnect sexually. But again, instead of exploring why the fantasy alone is working for them, and also what this sexual reconnection could mean for their relationship, these scenes of sexual connection are presented as brief and perfunctory punchlines.
The film then takes a real nosedive when the couple return to their Los Angeles home. After not texting Mags for days, Angela reaches out saying she’s stopping in LA on her way to Thailand. The final act is one last slapdash farce that spends more time with Mags and Ash talking about their threesome fantasy, trying to get their equally bored married couple trivia night friends to go home, and one poorly staged Viagra joke, than it does in exploring what any of these events actually mean to the couple on an emotional level. On top of the narrative vapidity, the sequence is filled with stale jokes and a score that is so broad and obvious, it’s as if Dagerman knows the jokes aren’t very good but thinks maybe the music will help them land.
While the sequence where Angela and Mags finally consummate their feelings for each other is filmed with tenderness, Rajan plays Ash too broadly. We’re meant to believe he is finally putting his wife’s desires and needs above his own, but it’s hard to buy that within a few seconds he’s experienced a moment of growth where watching his wife hookup with another woman doesn’t just turn him on. The same goes for Ringel, whose inability to bring any interiority to Mags throughout the film makes what should be an exhilarating breakthrough for the character land with a thud.
Worst yet, we don’t know how Angela, whose character is used more as a plot device rather than as a real person with her own feelings and agency, feels about being their unicorn. Park does her best to imbue Angela with some nuance. When Mags asks Angela why she never texted her back, the latter says, “You seem like the kind of woman who gets what she wants pretty easily … I wanted to stay on your mind.” The chemistry here between the actresses is palpable, but despite their final scene together, their supposedly passionate connection is never given room to breathe or explored with any depth.
The film ends focused on the relationship between Mags and Ash, without any sort of emotional closure for Angela. We last see her in bed with Mags, her back to the camera, as Ash watches. In the end, this adventure may have helped Mags and Ash reconnect as a couple, but Ringel’s shallow script essentially renders Angela into a walking, talking sex toy, rather than a person of her own. Like the worst kind of voyeuristic, heterosexual swingers, the film dabbles in non-monogamy and same-sex attraction solely as a means to heteronormative ends.
