I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOU - Mark Reviews Movies

I Don't Understand You, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 5, 2025

It takes quite a leap of understanding—both in terms of logic and sympathy—to even try to accept where co-writers/co-directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano's movie goes. I Don't Understand You begins as a sweet comedy about a married couple dealing with the stress of waiting to hear if they'll be adopting a baby. By the third act, though, it transforms into an entirely different sort of comedy with a completely contradictory tone.

Craig and Crano have, in a way, made their movie immune to any review that might care about maintaining the filmmakers' efforts to surprise. The biggest problem with the movie happens about halfway through it, with little hint or narrative foreshadowing about the course its extended climax will take. The material seems like a harmless comedy for that first half, in which we just watch a likeable couple attempt to forget their worries and find some time to relax with a vacation to Italy. To say that they end up doing far more harm than good by the time their getaway comes to an end would be an understatement.

The couple in question consists of Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells), who are married and had hoped to have a child by this point in their lives and their relationship. Things went bad on the last try to adopt, after the two discovered they had been duped by a woman for no reason, it seems, other than cruelty. This time, though, the two have let themselves get their hopes up, since Candace (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant woman looking for a loving couple who will raise her baby, seems both sincere and, more importantly, legitimately pregnant.

These two men desperately want to be parents, and that's important to note and for the filmmakers to tell us again and again, because that entire third act depends on us accepting that's the reason they do what they do and on us sympathizing with them on account of that motive. One could argue that Craig and Crano don't necessarily want us to care about them or their reasons after at least one point in the couple's elaborate, unsettling scheme to cover up what happens and what they do in the process. It probably wouldn't be a good argument, to be sure, for two basic reasons. First, the filmmakers clearly want us to care about the men and their motive, because the story goes the way it does.

Second, the material might have succeeded if it simply embraced the notion that Dom and Cole aren't worthy of sympathy after a certain point in their plan. Everything that happens is simply too dark, too mean, too violent, and too out-of-character to follow along with the logic and the emotional grounding the filmmakers attempt to maintain here.

We're getting ahead of ourselves in the setup, of course, but when a movie so thoroughly defeats itself with a particular choice, it's difficult to keep focus on a basic sort of synopsis. Essentially, Dom and Cole head to Italy to await word from Candace and, hopefully, have one final vacation as a childless couple. They rekindle some old feelings that have been lost with recent disappointments, meet with some family friends (One of them gifts the two engraved pocket knives, although at least one of them should have "Chekhov" written on it), have some awkward moments of miscommunication with locals, and plan to have an exclusive dinner at a remote restaurant run by a woman Dom has heard about for years.

This is all pretty simple stuff, but because Kroll and Rannells are funny and charming together, it is kind of funny and charming. Things go wrong when Dom gives Cole bad directions while they're driving to the restaurant, which is in the middle of nowhere, and at least, that little turn hints at some change to the plot and mood of the story. Once they do arrive at the home-based dining establishment and meet the kind older chef Luciana (Nunzia Schiano), the material becomes a comedy of errors and misunderstandings that have deadly consequences.

That's all, perhaps, that should be said of the specifics of the resulting plot. More broadly and to the point, that plotting must transform our protagonists into both idiots and casual sociopaths for any of it to function and, especially, so that it can keep piling on the complications, obstacles, and, well, corpses that get in the way of their potential happiness. I Don't Understand You is an appropriate title, then, if only because it's what one might want to shout at the screen as the movie keeps going in such a wrongheaded direction.

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