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Romantic comedies have always trafficked in messiness—botched encounters, errant desires, the hazards of timing—before tying it all into a bow of wish fulfillment. But what happens when the genre dares to stop tying the bow? Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome, premiering at SXSW and now entering wider release, attempts precisely that: a rom-com that acknowledges the wreckage of intimacy, the moral ambiguity of desire, and the lingering aftershocks of one reckless night. The result is a curious hybrid—half dramedy of consequences, half indie flirtation with chaos—that is both captivating and uneven, a film that gestures toward a reinvention of the genre but falters under its own tonal contradictions.
The setup is disarmingly simple. Connor (Jonah Hauer-King), a chronically nice young man in the “puppy dog” mold, spots Olivia (Zoey Deutch), his former coworker and enduring crush, at a wedding. He pursues her with a sweet awkwardness that borders on inertia. Olivia, impulsive and mercurial, brushes him off until the introduction of a third presence: Jenny (Ruby Cruz), a graduate student stood up by her date. Soon enough, the trio’s chance encounter leads them from cocktails to a spontaneous ménage à trois. Hartigan cuts away before things become explicit, but the suggestion is enough: a reckless indulgence that will reverberate far beyond a single night. Weeks later, both women discover they are pregnant. What began as a frothy premise collapses into the burden of consequence.
That shift—rom-com setup into drama of responsibility—is where The Threesome both distinguishes itself and loses its balance. Screenwriter Ethan Ogilby resists the easy terrain of jealousies and playful rivalries. Connor does not fall in love with both women; Olivia and Jenny do not embark on a sapphic side plot. Instead, the narrative insists on consequence: two pregnancies, two uncertain futures, and one hapless man caught between a woman he idolizes and another who sees him as a means of survival. This is not so much a love triangle as a misshapen geometry of obligation, shame, and longing.
Yet Hartigan never fully decides whether to play the scenario as satire, melodrama, or heartfelt indie character study. One moment, we have a trumpet player delivering a literal “womp-womp” gag; the next, Sing Howe Yam’s cinematography frames a tear-streaked close-up with Bergmanesque severity. The film oscillates between tones like a needle skipping across vinyl, never quite landing on the groove.
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At the center of this tonal turbulence stand three unevenly written characters. Connor is perhaps the weakest link: a man so saturated in niceness that he becomes dramatically inert. Hauer-King struggles to make “the good guy” compelling, and while his singing interlude—crooning as Deutch wrestles with a crib—might have been intended as charming, it lands as inexplicable. Olivia fares better. Deutch, arguably the most reliable rom-com actress of her generation, leans into Olivia’s volatility with full-bodied commitment. She explodes with fury one moment, collapses in regret the next, and somehow makes her character’s whiplash decisions feel emotionally grounded. Still, repetition dulls the impact: each cycle of freakout, reversal, and reconciliation makes Olivia’s indecision predictable rather than illuminating.
It is Jenny who emerges as the film’s secret heart. Ruby Cruz crafts a portrait of quiet turmoil: a young woman torn between religious devotion and bodily autonomy, between her family’s stern disapproval and her own hesitant desires. Unlike Olivia’s volatility, Jenny’s conflict is inward, whispered in her stolen glances and stammered evasions. Her decision to present Connor as her serious boyfriend to placate her family injects both humor and pathos into the narrative. Jaboukie Young-White, as Connor’s sardonic friend Greg, mines these tensions for comedy, needling Jenny about her pious family while helping Connor survive a baby shower interrogation about his fictive church volunteering. These scenes, where faith and farce collide, achieve the delicate balance the film otherwise struggles to maintain.
Thematically, The Threesome dances uneasily with the specter of sex-shaming. By making pregnancy the inevitable outcome of casual intimacy, the film flirts with a conservative moral undercurrent: the punishment of characters who stray from restraint. Olivia’s impulsiveness, Jenny’s sexual experimentation, and Connor’s passivity all culminate not in liberation but in life-altering burdens. The script never outright condemns them, yet the narrative scaffolding suggests a world where premarital sex inevitably leads to regret. Whether this is a sly critique of cultural conservatism or an unexamined reflex is difficult to parse. Either way, the film’s emphasis on consequence over joy feels out of step with the genre it ostensibly inhabits.
And yet, there is something undeniably refreshing about a rom-com—or a rom-com-adjacent dramedy—that resists the escapist gloss. Hartigan and Ogilby seem determined to dramatize the “messiness” critics often invoke as the defining feature of modern romance. Here, messiness is not just flirtatious banter or missed connections but the genuine chaos of adulthood: unintended pregnancies, family expectations, the erosion of freedom. The refusal to tidy this up with a bow, even if it alienates audiences seeking wish fulfillment, signals an ambition to reshape the genre for an era that prizes authenticity over fantasy.
Still, ambition does not guarantee coherence. Compared to Richard Linklater’s lived-in realism or Greta Gerwig’s sharp tonal calibrations, Hartigan’s direction feels indecisive. The indie sheen—natural lighting, muted palettes, handheld intimacy—sits uneasily beside cutaway gags and rom-com contrivances. One senses a director pulled in competing directions: toward the earnest moral weight of consequence and the breezy playfulness of genre tradition. The film never synthesizes them into a stable whole.
Where The Threesome excels is in fleeting moments: Deutch’s Olivia laughing through tears as she contemplates motherhood; Cruz’s Jenny, silent at a family dinner, her face a mask of filial obedience cracked by hidden defiance; Greg skewering religious hypocrisy with a one-liner that lands like a dart. These fragments suggest the sharper, more daring film The Threesome could have been—a story not about punishment for desire, but about the complexity of living with it.
As for its place in the larger landscape of romantic comedy revival, Hartigan’s film offers both a warning and an opportunity. Wish fulfillment may be out of step with the digital age, but consequence alone does not a satisfying romance make. The genre’s future likely lies not in discarding fantasy but in weaving it with reality, acknowledging mess without drowning in it. The Threesome gestures toward this synthesis but stops short, its tonal dissonance leaving audiences unsure whether to laugh, cry, or cringe.
Ultimately, The Threesome is a mixed bag—cute in flashes, disjointed in others, occasionally profound, more often confused. It is not the rom-com renaissance some may crave, but it is an experiment worth noting: a film that asks what happens when we stop pretending love is tidy, even if it cannot quite decide what to do with the mess it uncovers.
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