Imagine having a noisy upstairs neighbor. He is nearly 6’7”, always in combat boots, and every morning, it sounded like they were invading Poland above your kitchen. It becomes a daily fixation, the kind of thing your partner and you joke about endlessly, even though it slowly gets on your last nerve. You even tell friends about ‘Loud Greg.’ They nodded politely, unsure what to say.
So, would you make a movie about this? No. However, that is what Director/Writer Rachel Wolther has attempted with The French Italian.
In theaters in New York at the Quad Cinema on October 3, 2025, and Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, Glendale, Town Center, and Noho on October 10th, before becoming available on VOD on October 28th, in short, The French Italian is a film that mistakes a common experience for something worthy of a feature. In reality, it is a self-conscious, quasi-comedy of artistic delusion that feels like it’s performing for a senior show at The Universal Art College.
The premise might have been better suited as a sharp, biting short: a neurotic Brooklyn couple fixates on their noisy neighbors and channels that obsession into an off-Broadway play. Stretched to feature length, the idea collapses under its own arch irony, like a one-act that does not realize the curtain should have dropped twenty minutes earlier.
The setup is promising enough: Lovey-dovey couple Doug and Valerie, played by Aristotle Athari (known for his work on Saturday Night Live) and Catherine Cohen (a comedian known for 2022’s Netflix’s special The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous), are forced to leave their rent-stabilized apartment after being driven mad by their karaoke-obsessed downstairs neighbors whose mere existence becomes an affront to their daily lives. Holed up in Doug’s parents’ upstate home, they start to spiral, weaponizing their rage into an act of revenge theater. It is a premise ripe for satire, narcissism of city transplants, the fragile ecosystem of indie theater, and a blurred line between inspiration and cruelty.
All of this in mind, The French Italian never finds its footing. The performances are pitched somewhere between parody and sincerity, leaving the audience unsure whether to laugh or cringe. Cohen’s Val, styled like a Zooey Deschanel doppelgänger who wandered out of a 2012 Tumblr feed, feels less like a character and more like a caricature. Athari, meanwhile, oscillates between the straight man and the clown, his timing off just enough to make every exchange feel vaguely rehearsed or forced.
Directorally speaking, Wolther makes equally baffling choices. The camera often tilts upward at the actors, creating a sense of awareness of its presence. Scenes that should convey emotional unraveling instead play like a student film’s attempt at “quirky cinema vérité.” The party sequence in particular feels over-staged (every single person in the party gathered together to face the camera while the two leads also talk to the camera…)
For a story that aims to satirize performance and ego, The French Italian never convinces us that these people could exist outside the screenplay. The dialogue feels manufactured; the supposedly spontaneous asides feel like they were drawn from a joke grab bag in the writer’s room. By the time the couple’s relationship implodes in the final act, a scene meant to mirror their earlier intimacy, it feels contrived rather than the emotional payoff it aims to be.
Buried beneath its pretentiousness is a kernel of a better film. Wolther clearly grasps the absurd theater of modern urban life and the claustrophobia of living in NYC. Still, her feature Comedy is so enamored with its own meta-cleverness that it forgets to make you laugh. That is why Cryptic Rock gives The French Italian 2 out of 5 stars.
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