Sundance London 2023: You Hurt My Feelings

Originally published 09/07/23 on Letterboxd

A pleasantly low-stakes, languorous Late-style picture about taking comfort in mediocrity. There’s a rather acerbic dryness to this, where Holofcener seems to be lambasting herself as much as she does the upper-middle-class professionals with cushy jobs that she so acutely paints an unflattering portrait of. Even the language that her characters converse in is so loaded with the syntax of therapy and Positive Affirmations™ that it ingeniously obfuscates the rather dull and mundane simplicity of their problems. In all honesty, I am simply glad that with the increasing bureaucratisation of writing as a career path and the looming spectre of entities like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over the careers of the young and naive, something like this - which asserts that some people are just bad writers and that talent has nothing to do with success or self-satisfaction - exists.