Writer-director Emma Seligman’s debut about a young woman running into her sugar daddy at a family event is an amusing, transparently personal piece
This debut feature from 25-year-old writer-director Emma Seligman is an amusing, self-aware, indulgent and transparently personal chamber piece, developed from an earlier short she submitted as her NYU thesis film. It could have been partly inspired by the party scene at the beginning of The Graduate, the one where smug oldsters tell Dustin Hoffman’s character he should be getting into plastics.
Actor and online comic Rachel Sennott plays Danielle, aimlessly out of college and picking up cash with what she tells her parents is a regular “babysitting” gig; one day she shows up with them at a shiva (that is, the Jewish observance not dissimilar to a wake) expecting to endure only the usual questioning from relatives about why she is so thin, why she doesn’t have a boyfriend and what she’s going to do with her life.