Starring Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris, Adam Demos, Erika Heynatz, Dominic Ona-Ariki
A particular laziness permeates the ensemble friendship comedy that assumes casting four funny actors constitutes characterization. Spa Weekend assembles Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Michelle Buteau and Anna Faris, four performers whose individual comic abilities should make them an easy group to root for, but writer-director duo Jon Lucas and Scott Moore mistake collective charisma for chemistry. It's a consequential mistake for a film whose premise depends on convincing us not only that these women were once close, but also that there's something between them worth recovering.
Jane (Mann), Coco (Buteau) and Sophie (Faris) arrive at a luxury resort for a long-overdue girls' weekend, only to unexpectedly reunite with Mel (Fisher), the estranged fourth member of their once-inseparable group. Her reappearance brings old resentments and buried secrets with it, turning a restorative weekend into a series of confrontations and contrived comic disasters.
There is nothing inherently wrong with how familiar this is; a friendship comedy with women doesn't need to reinvent the genre when its relationships prove specific enough to make familiar territory feel new. The pleasure of a friendship comedy always exists in the private languages, petty grievances and accumulated knowledge that make decades of intimacy feel lived-in rather than conveniently explained. But Spa Weekend spends far more time telling us these women have a history than allowing us to see it.
The film repeatedly returns to the maxim that "every friend group has a friend that everybody secretly hates," a joke that becomes revealing of how Spa Weekend understands friendship: as a collection of types rather than relationships between specific people. Each woman occupies her designated role until her subplot reveals that — surprise! — more lurks beneath the surface.
Coco is particularly ill-served by this approach. The film saddles Buteau with a version of the "angry Black woman" archetype so blunt that the film seems to believe acknowledging the stereotype absolves it of using it, which of course it doesn't. Naming a trope while continuing to structure a character around it is not subversion by any means. What makes this particularly frustrating is that Buteau gives the film its best comic performance, finding timing and intensity in lines that rarely deserve either.
Despite Buteau's strength in intensity, volume prevails as Spa Weekend's governing comic principle. A goat-yoga class becomes pandemonium, minor misunderstandings become screaming matches, and every inconvenience metastasizes into another, louder set piece. Even visually, Lucas and Moore rarely find much beyond jumping between close-ups as though proximity might generate comic rhythm. The escalation becomes relentless but rarely accumulative. The movie falls into the fallacy that bigger and louder automatically means funnier.
Strangely, for a film ostensibly celebrating the sustaining power of female friendship, Spa Weekend is far more convincing when it turns to romance. Coco chemistry with Roger (Dominic Ona-Ariki) feels authentic, which makes their reconciliation plausible. Their problems exist alongside genuine affection rather than in place of it. Even Jane generates more immediate chemistry with the resort's yoga instructor, Kai (Adam Demos), than with the women she has supposedly known for decades. For a movie so eager to insist on the irreplaceable value of female friendship, it's remarkably bad at imagining that friendship as a relationship worth investing in on its own terms.
Plenty of movies have been made about women discovering that friendship has survived the compromises of adulthood. Spa Weekend offers the inverse: four women insist they share decades of history while the film supplies almost no evidence of it. Friendship is treated as a premise rather than a relationship, which might explain why, by the time everyone has screamed, confessed and reconciled, these women still feel like they have only just met.
