Healthy Attitudes: Our Review of ‘Spinster’

Posted in Movies, VOD/iTunes/DigitalDownload by - August 07, 2020
Healthy Attitudes: Our Review of ‘Spinster’

There’s just not a damn thing wrong with being single…

Spinster is actually more then you’d think by looking at it on the surface.  It’s a thoughtful look at the nonsense and the pressures put on people to find that “special someone” to “take care of them”.

After her partner breaks up with her on her 39th birthday, Gaby (Chelsea Peretti) tackles her fears of loneliness as well as preconceptions of what it means for a woman to be single.

While you could easily lean on a feminist bent in Spinster that celebrates female independence what it is really about is not being afraid to push back against sociality and conventional norms in order to be able to live your own life.

With Spinster director Andrea Dorfman and writer Jennifer Deyell have pushed back against the standard rom-com tropes and made a film where it’s OK to love yourself; an ideal that is so important and so forgotten in so many ways.

The film has a real flow to it and feels incredibly natural from beginning to end and in a twist it allows Canada to be Canada without hitting us over the head with it and its inherent Canadian-ness.  It’s not trying to set up any expected bits or tropes and takes genuine care in actually trying to be honest.  None of the characters in this film feel forced, rather they are all people that we’ve met at various stages of our lives and feel 100% real.

Yeah the staging of it occasionally feels a little basic at times and not quite up to the level of the material on the page, but that’s OK because Dorfman really has made something that feels like it could be the stage version of a piece of cinema verite…at your local playhouse.

There’s a tone of uncertainty in the story that allows it all to feel relatable and having a movie with a lead character that is just trying to figure her shit out, is actually a beautiful thing to see.  It works because of a fantastic performance that as a critic I honestly didn’t see coming.

Chelsea Peretti is the heart and the soul of this film and quite frankly why it all actually works.  With audiences expecting the trademark snarkiness that she brings every week in Brooklyn Nine Nine and adjusts not up or down per say but into this woman who kind of realizes that she’s never been all that happy with herself so how the hell could she be happy with someone else?  It’s refreshing to see a character like this on the screen and Peretti gives it some genuine heart as she’s not spending the movie setting up various jokes, she inhabits a character with some real dimensions to her and she does it exceptionally well.

At the end of the day with Spinster; people have been calling it the anti rom-com but I’d have to respectfully disagree with that idea.  It’s a romantic comedy about being OK with loving yourself, and that’s fine by me.  With the myriad of cookie cutter movies about some “great gal” who just can’t find the right guy until she meets “some guy” or the idea that people should just “settle” and couple up anyway is just so unhealthy that I for one am pretty damn happy to see someone on screen being OK, with being on their own.

  • Release Date: 7/8/2020
This post was written by
David Voigt is a Toronto based writer with a problem and a passion for the moving image and all things cinema. Having moved from production to the critical side of the aisle for well over 10 years now at outlets like Examiner.com, Criticize This, Dork Shelf (Now That Shelf), to.Night Newspaper he’s been all across his city, the country and the continent in search of all the news and reviews that are fit to print from the world of cinema.
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