I Don’t Understand You Overreaches Its Simple but Charming Thriller Premise

Just how much mileage can you get in a cinematic comedy/horror/thriller hybrid from the protagonists not being able to speak the primary language of their setting? As the misunderstandings pile up, at what point does such a conceit wear thin? Directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano’s I Don’t Understand You seems to be an exercise in finding practical, quantifiable answers to those questions, a tonally wobbly but engagingly performed comedy of errors with the perfect lead performers, but not quite enough of an idea of what to do with them. The Italy-set farce can boast 96 minutes of smooth comedic chemistry, but struggles to organically integrate its believable characters with the madcap situation it’s building around them, ultimately feeling like it’s missing some final push into more subversive territory.

Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells) are well-to-do L.A. yuppies, a gay couple who have been trying for years to wind their way through the arduous process of adopting a baby from a surrogate mother. In the home stretch of potentially getting the thumbs up from their ideal baby donor–it seems like an odd choice of time to do this–they elect to embark on an Italian “babymoon” of sorts, only to become embroiled in rural, eventually deadly hijinks in an area where English comprehension borders on nonexistent. Need I even add that Dom and Cole naturally speak not a word of Italian, beyond Dom’s first-lesson-on-the-way-to-the-airport Duolingo brush up? They form a broad parody of insufferable, affluent American travelers abroad, people who don’t put in even the most basic effort to hide their consumerist self-focus.

The elements of I Don’t Understand You that work well almost entirely come down to the believable, genuinely lived-in chemistry and friction of Kroll and Rannells’ performances. This is little surprise; the two have worked together for years in the context of Kroll’s animated Netflix series Big Mouth, and together they have the easy familiarity of a couple that has gotten entirely comfortable–maybe too comfortable–with each other’s quirks and failings. They’re actually quite sweet together at times, and the film doesn’t break the sincerity of their interactions with jokes quite as often as one might expect, as the two talk about their hopes for parenthood and grapple with some of the psychological residue of an earlier incident where they were conned by a fraud mother with a fake pregnancy. This lingering trauma really isn’t played for laughs, but rather gives the couple an emotional anchor of hesitation, and a fear that any good news regarding their adopted child could be taken away from them at the last moment. Ultimately, it also makes them more desperate to get home when the situation in Italy turns dire, lest they lose out on this singular chance to make good as parents.

It’s this realistic grounding of the characters that simultaneously makes the tone of I Don’t Understand You difficult to parse at times. It suffers from odd pacing, with 20 to 30 minutes of relatively lighthearted Italian vacation dramedy ambling by before the smallest of problems begin to crop up in the plans of Dom and Cole to drink wine and eat more authentic forms of pizza. The idea that we’re watching a “horror comedy” is teased so obliquely and briefly that the average viewer could miss it entirely, which makes the genuine arrival of deadly, accidental mayhem around the halfway point feel awkwardly abrupt. Other films have been made with this kind of “digging ourselves in deeper and deeper” ethos, as the characters are forced to constantly participate in accidental violence and take increasingly direct roles in it, but those films typically revolve around more unlikable asshole protagonists who are themselves conceited and problematic, adding a viewer desire for eventual comeuppance or karmic payback. A comparison point might be something like bawdy late ‘90s black comedy Very Bad Things, but where that film involves a bunch of arrogant, testosterone-addled bros accidentally killing someone and then turning on each other, I Don’t Understand You’s duo are inherently sympathetic as expectant parents, putting us as viewers in an awkward moral position. Should we really be rooting for them to get away with killing people simply because they really want to be dads? Are the Italian characters really that expendable that we shouldn’t care if they live or die because of some misunderstandings in comprehension?