When writer-director Leslye Headland presented her second feature film, Sleeping with Other People, at the Sundance Film Festival, she described it as "When Harry met Sally for assholes". Turns out, that's an apt description.
Jason Sudeikis (Horrible Bosses) and Alison Brie (The Five-Year Engagement) team up in this raunchy comedy about a couple who meet at a Sex addicts Anonymous meeting 12 years after losing their virginity to each other at university.
Jake (Sudeikis) has become a loveable rogue who sleeps with people to get out of committed relationships, and Lainey (Brie) is a serial cheater who can't move on from her affair with an unavailable gynaecologist (Adam Scott).
Jake and Lainey hit it off but decide to keep their relationship platonic, while director Headland has fun spinning the premise of whether men and women can be just friends.The pair end up acting like a couple even though they aren't, but unlike other films in which the audience alone knows the characters are perfect for each other, they admit they're attracted to each other. Which means they require a safe word for when one of them gets excited; "mousetrap" seems to do the trick.
Headland's script is clever, for both its brash, fast-paced one-liners and because it borrows previous film ideas and repackages them. Jake's graphic description of how Lainey can pleasure herself harks back to the film Headland herself referenced, When Harry Met Sally. It's a different orgasm joke, but the honesty and shock value is the same.
