Greener Grass Parent Guide

Jill (Jocelyn DeBoer) lives in a lovely little community with her perfect husband Nick (Beck Bennett) and their adorable son Julian (Julian Hillard). Their neighbors, Lisa (Dawn Luebbe) and Dennis (Neil Casey), are good friends, and their children play on the same soccer team. Jill likes Lisa so much she gives her Madison, her newborn daughter. But if you think that’s strange, fasten your seatbelt….

This is a deeply weird movie, which means I thoroughly enjoyed it. Think The Truman Show meets The Twilight Zone. The film deliberately cultivates its unsettling atmosphere, which is steeped in passive aggression and outright hostility with just a sprinkling of horror. The characters are straight from central casting in the Uncanny Valley: aliens trying to be human or very alien humans? We’re not sure, but the result is that it gets very, very creepy. I swear that I’ve had nightmares that looked exactly like this movie, down to the little golf carts everyone drives instead of cars.

The comedy is a little flat at times, but I will say that some of the gags made me laugh out loud. There’s a very specific line between “comedically tragic” and “nightmarishly comic” and that’s where this flick’s good jokes land. The rest tend to fall into outright comedy, which is less effective given the tone. A few scenes also land a little too firmly in the “nightmarish” camp, including the one in which a character removes her braces with a pair of pliers. As someone who’s recently had to drag himself to the orthodontist, this was a particularly unpleasant moment.

So, you ask, does this David Lynch-lite type movie qualify as appropriate family viewing? That definitely depends on your family’s values and entertainment standards. The profanity is a little more than I expected, with three sexual expletives mixed in with fairly mild and infrequent swearing. Greener Grass is also not suitable for children, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a slow and creepy thriller, and second, kids are unlikely to get the jokes about the utter existential horror of social suburbia. Elementary school simply doesn’t really prepare you for the nightmarish dread of playing “keeping up with the Joneses”.

This film is hard to recommend to a broad audience, but if you like quirky, dark, offbeat movies, you’ll enjoy Greener Grass. Between the brutal satire of suburban social drama and the bizarre comedy, there’s a good heart that comes from being a passion project - the two female leads wrote and directed the film, and they clearly cared how it turned out. You can also tell they had almost as much fun making it as I did watching it.