After a fairly quiet last few years (at least since his iconic brief stint in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), Michael Cera is back in the spotlight. This July he’ll be seen in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and then in August his reunion with writer-director Dustin Guy Defa following Person to Person will arrive in theaters, not to mention upcoming films by Kristoffer Borgli, Eric Wareheim, and Michael Angarano.
The Adults, which premiered at Berlinale earlier this year and will stop by Tribeca, follows Eric (Cera) as he returns home for a short visit and finds himself caught between reuniting with his sisters and chasing a victory with his old poker group. As the trip extends, Eric finds it increasingly difficult to avoid confrontations and revelations as his carefully constructed façade of his adulthood gives way to old childhood conflicts. While Maggie (Sophia Lillis) attempts to recreate the intimate world the three of them once shared, Eric and Rachel (Hannah Gross) are faced with the divide between their childhood selves and the adults they are now.
Rory O’Connor said in his Berlinale review, “Six years after directing his last feature, Dustin Guy Defa returns with The Adults, a film of complicated shared histories and gradually revealing inner lives. With his relatively sprawling Person to Person, Defa followed a wide array of characters over five interweaving storylines. This time he focuses on one family and, closer still, on an unmistakable feeling: that of moving out and growing up, only to return home and realize all that delicately assembled adulthood was merely a façade. Playing out across a leafy town in upstate New York, The Adults follows a trio of siblings as they reunite: the brother who went away and the sisters who did not.”
See the first trailer below.
The Adults opens in theaters on August 18.