THE STORY – A suburban couple’s life spirals out of control when they rent out their garage to mysterious tenants.
THE CAST – Adam Scott, Danielle Deadwyler, Theo Rossi, Kate Berlant, Nazanin Boniadi, Daveed Diggs, Ron Perlman, Colleen Camp & Greg Kinnear
THE TEAM –Kevin Hamedani (Director/Writer) & Travis Betz (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
Satire, when done right, can be a powerful tool that sharply stings the hearts and minds of everyone who comes across it. That’s the inherent gift of comedy, which can naturally come off as a defense mechanism to cope with or respond to the often nightmarish scenarios we experience in life. Yet, more often than not, there are attempts at satire that come off as grating, preachy, or, more importantly, succeeding in being what all successful satires are… funny. “The Saviors,” unfortunately, falls into the latter, proving to be a misguided misfire that grows increasingly dated as each scene unhumorously unfolds before our eyes, even with Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler trying their best to bring it to life.
Kevin Hamedani’s sophomore feature opens with a conception of Americanized normality as Sean (Adam Scott) dreams of a cherished memory: waking up to his wife, Kim (Danielle Deadwyler), in their lovely suburban home, exchanging cutesy banter. This memory quickly fades, becoming a nightmare for Sean and keying in on the audience’s internalized fears that only become rampant for our protagonist. The once-happy-go-lucky couple is, in fact, estranged, having to rent out their guest house through Airbnb to pay their rising mortgage in the wake of Sean’s unemployment. Cue in Amir and Toherb (played by Theo Rossi and Nazanin Boniadi), siblings of Middle Eastern descent renting this guest house for the next eight days, coincidentally in time for the President’s visit to the town where Sean and Kim live. The niceties all but fade as Sean’s paranoia about Amir and Toherb rises from their seemingly anomalous behavior, or at least from Sean’s standards. The clues and lies start piling up as Sean and, eventually, Kim descend into an ill-informed psychosis propping up their foolish hero complexes.
It’s clear that Hamedani’s ambitions focus on dissecting the rampant islamophobia found within Americans, and how that makes for a deadly combination with man’s inherent need to be the hero of one’s own story. Even more so, how these biases transcend race and political party, as Hamedani and co-writer Travis Betz want to point out the bigotry that can break through the liberal facade. The intent is well plastered all over “The Saviors,” yet it’s the failure to land the punchline amid one superficial setup that ultimately makes it a painfully unfunny experience. The style of humor Hamedani and Betz register in is quickly evident to audiences as early as a sequence where Sean’s family dinner blasts off half-hearted jests about Muslims, Jews, and African Americans to showcase the variety of biases everyone has. If it weren’t for Ron Perlman’s comedic timing, there would be little humor about it.
The rare moments of effective comedy often come through Greg Kinnear’s cartoonish private detective, whose on-and-off-again romance with Sean’s soft-launched conservative sister Cleo, played by Kate Berlant, is played up for laughs, especially through his nonsensical dialogue. Kinnear isn’t bogged by any of the heavy lifting in selling the idea that this film also doubles as a thriller, and an ineffective one at that. Hamedani’s direction struggles to sell any of the thriller elements, with a rein on building tension and resorting to cheap scares that only do enough to show he’s eager to mesh genres without the ability to do so. The more “The Saviors” attempts to be serious, the more comical it becomes, especially with the relationship at the heart of the film not fleshed out in a way worth rooting for Sean and Kim’s marriage to survive, even when their twisted sense of coming together is through racial prejudice.
Scott garners some laughs, mainly due to his ability to be an emotive performer in the face of the nonsense spewed at him, especially by Berlant’s Cleo, whose caricature stands out like a sore thumb. Deadwyler, who we never get to see embrace her comedic chops as often (most likely why she was brilliant in the fourth season of “The Bear”), tries to join in on the fun. Yet, the character of Kim is far less of a priority in her dynamic than Scott’s, leaving her on the wayside. Rossi and Boniadi have a tough task to sell audiences on the stereotypes imposed on them. Still, with their characters intentionally clouded by mystery, they’re rarely given the chance to break past how we’re supposed to see them, even if, from the start, it’s all the more obvious they aren’t the embodiment of the harmful projections placed onto them. Credit to Hamedani for a gutsy premise that crumbles not only under a reveal that’s all the more ridiculous, but also under the technical depth that elevates “The Saviors” from anything beyond a baffling concept.
