‘Good Grief’: Dan Levy’s First Feature Will Make You Groan

Not 20 minutes into Good Grief, the feature-length directorial debut from Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy (streaming on Netflix Jan. 5), the actor—who also wrote and stars in the film—tees up the first of several soft-spoken meditations on loss. “I’ve been reading that the brain is like a muscle,” Levy’s character, Marc, says about the recent death of his husband. “That’s why getting over a death is so hard: because your brain has been trained to feel things for a person. And when they go away, your head is still operating under the impression that it should feel those things for that person. Like…muscle memory.”

While that is a completely surface-level and obvious examination of the feeling of grief, Levy delivers the dialogue he wrote for himself with a navel-gazing sense of pride, thinly masked by his character’s monotonous tone. There’s a false profundity to this and the countless other itinerant soliloquies that make up Good Grief. These shallow vignettes—which are practically lab-designed for Netflix to screenshot and post on their social media accounts for engagement—are strung together with little flair. If there were something between the lines, some kernel of novelty in the complicated and endlessly workable depth of grief, this 100-minute vanity project could easily save itself from the dregs of streaming content. But that originality never arrives, despite Levy’s apparent confidence that it’s omnipresent.

One of the film’s few saving graces is that it’s nice to look at, in the static way that a photograph that not many patrons are viewing in the corner of a museum is nice to look at. It’s pretty and well-staged, much like a CB2 store. In the film’s opening scene, set at a Christmas party Marc and his husband Oliver (Luke Evans) are throwing, this feeling of window shopping is somewhat pleasant. There’s a comeliness to this London flat held by two gay men for whom style is about having expensive things, curated with no taste. That’s a real phenomenon, one that attracts plenty of moochers for the free booze and warm lighting, including Marc’s two best friends, Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel).

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