Adulthood

“To its credit, Adulthood does weave in disability storylines without sensationalizing them.”

Title: Adulthood (2025)
Director: Alex Winter 👨🏼🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇺🇸
Writer: Michael M.B. Galvin 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 2/5

Alex Winter's dark comedy, Adulthood, tackles big ideas like morality and family dysfunction. But predictable plotting and ho-hum performances make the film an exercise in patience. The premise itself is sound: Adult daughter Meg (Kaya Scodelario) and son Noah (Josh Gad) discover a dead body in their mother Judy’s (Ingunn Omholt) house and get dragged into a web of deceit. The siblings make a series of poor decisions, unleashing a torrent of collateral damage, all while justifying their actions as a means of protecting their families.

But the pat lesson—that everyone is only a mistake or two away from complete disaster—would make for a better short film than 98 minutes of knowing exactly what’s to come. No sharp humor or stylish visuals move things along, making Adulthood feel like a thought experiment that’s dragged out for way too long

Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Among two co-leads, Meg is a woman, and female characters have several supporting roles as police lieutenant Zell (Camille James), mom Judy whose stroke and subsequent hospital stay kicks off the entire plot, and Billie Lourd (in the film’s best performance) as an opportunistic home health aide who bribes Meg and Noah. But none of these women are particularly nuanced, nor do they hold significant relationships with one another. The main bonds exist between the sister-brother duo as well as between Meg and her husband, Diego (Nicolás Londoño), and their two sons.

Race: 2/5

Characters of color only have minor and supporting roles, and none of them are remotely three-dimensional. On the neutral-positive side, Diego and his sons are Latino, all of them portrayed as oblivious to Meg’s chaos. Less positive is Lieutenant Zell, a Black woman who never unravels what ought to be an open-and-shut case, given that several murders clearly connect to Meg and Noah. And in the film’s most sigh-worthy moment, innocent bystander T’Shawn (Sean O.G. Simms), the film’s only Black male character, gets ignominiously shot and killed. He’s not the only body count in the film—others are white—but it’s tropey when he’s both tokenized and also the first to go down.

Bonus for Disability: +0.25

To its credit, the movie does weave in disability storylines without sensationalizing them. Judy, who needs full-time care, suffers a stroke; though she’s treated passively by nurses and her own adult children, Judy does have a backstory that adds a bit of interest.

Additionally, Meg’s son Cayden (Alessio Andrada) has a chronic illness, implied to be diabetes, that requires him to track his blood sugar. Meg uses an app that blares a frightening alarm every time Cayden’s blood sugar drops below a certain level. The scenes of her dashing over to wake Cayden in the middle of the night to feed him juice, or staring at the app in abject horror when she’s too far away to do anything but hope that an adult is nearby to feed her son, clearly capture the sense of precarity that exists for people with chronic health conditions.

Make no mistake, though, the movie isn’t about Judy or Cayden. They exist only in relation to the nondisabled leads, and they do fall into the framing of being “burdens” to others. But they’re also loved, and Cayden mostly appears as a regular kid who’d rather be on his iPad than make small talk with his creepy uncle. I’d rather have these depictions of disability, flawed as they are, than not see them on screen at all.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.75/5

Adulthood will probably work for some as a crowd-pleasing black comedy. However, Scodelario and Gad’s forgettable performances, along with a simplistic plot that often fails to make sense, ultimately result in a less-than-stellar viewing experience.

Like Adulthood? Try these other dark comedies with underlying social messages.

Grade: CLiSeptember 20, 2025