Sleeping with Other People

The Anatomy of a Mess

There’s a scene in *Sleeping with Other People* that has no business working. Two people sit in a room, and one teaches the other how to masturbate with an empty plastic iced tea bottle. On the page, it sounds like a tossed-off Farrelly brothers bit. I went in bracing for the cheap laugh. Instead, what happens between Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey (Alison Brie) is so oddly gentle—so free of that locker-room wink—that it completely blindsided me. It plays like an instruction manual offered as something almost clinical in its closeness. They don’t touch. They just talk. And somehow it lands as the most romantic scene of 2015.



Writer-director Leslye Headland famously sold this as *When Harry Met Sally* for assholes. It’s a great line, but I’m not sure it quite fits. Nora Ephron wrote neurotics; Headland gives you addicts. We meet Jake and Lainey twelve years after they lost their virginity to each other in college, running into one another at a meeting for sex and love addicts. Jake keeps a rotating cast of women so he never has to feel anything. Lainey fixates on one indifferent gynecologist (Adam Scott, wielding a terrible mustache and that stiff, unbudging posture) for basically the same reason. They decide to try being platonic friends because they’re pretty sure they’ll wreck each other otherwise. It’s a familiar setup, sure, but Headland doesn’t sand down the damage. The camera hangs on how tired they look. You can see it in the way they move through New York—shoulders up against the wind, eyes flicking around every room, already clocking the closest exit.



Sudeikis is especially interesting here because he turns his signature smirk into a coping mechanism. He’s always been the likable fast-talker; in this movie the patter feels frantic, like silence would make the whole thing cave in. Brie, meanwhile, strips away the sunny innocence she nailed on *Community*. Her Lainey hums with panicky, self-sabotaging momentum. Watch her hands: always busy—fidgeting, twisting rings, clutching at sleeves—like her body can’t figure out where to put all that wanting. When they end up at a kid’s birthday party high on Molly and dance to David Bowie’s "Modern Love", they finally unclench. For three minutes, the armor just… slips.



Whether that fragile tone holds for the whole runtime probably comes down to how much patience you have for the usual genre gears clicking into place. The third act has to land the plane, and it does by moving onto slightly safer ground. As Kate Erbland wrote at IndieWire, the film "turns down the raunch levels just enough to allow actual affection to enter the equation". That’s fair—though I wish Headland had stayed with the messy, jagged versions of these people right through the finish. Still, the movie nails something real about how we live now: the elaborate rulebooks we build just to avoid getting hurt. *Sleeping with Other People* argues that romance isn’t about finding “the perfect person.” It’s about finding someone whose particular flavor of broken lines up with yours—and letting the walls finally come down.