One of the year’s unexpected indie hits, Humpday opens with
Ben (“mumblecore” director Mark Duplass) and Anna (an engaging,
relatable Alycia Delmore), a stable young married couple trying to
conceive their first child, awakened in the middle of the night by the
unexpected arrival of Ben’s would-be-Kerouac college buddy Andrew
(The Blair Witch Project‘s Joshua Leonard). The next night,
during a late-night bacchanalia with some of Andrew’s sexually
adventurous friends (including a funny, no-nonsense Lynn Shelton in a
sharp supporting turn), Ben and Andrew hatch a plan to film themselves
having sex (with each other) as an entry in an amateur porn contest
sponsored by Seattle weekly The Stranger.
Director Lynn Shelton (who’s also helming $5 Cover: Seattle)
mines the subsequent ‘will they or won’t they?’ plotline for plenty of
tension and comedy, but this high-concept film is not the indie mash-up
of Zack and Miri Make a Porno and I Now Pronounce You Chuck
and Larry that the premise suggests. It’s ultimately more genuine,
more realistic, and even more daring than its pitch-meeting
description. The portrait of modern middle-class marriage is
particularly affecting, but what Shelton is really aiming at here is a
gentle satire of masculine discomfort — Ben and Andrew’s
respective awkward sexual encounters with the opposite gender perhaps
more telling than the outcome of the bromantic collision course they’ve
set themselves on.
