The Oath

The Oath is a cutting indictment of all sides, reserving the most resentment for itself—or at least for writer-director Ike Barinholtz, who makes a dark comedy about a news-obsessed upper-middle-class woke white man, an identity which many of us both claim and resent ourselves for claiming. Which is why, even if you don’t fulfill all of the preceding quantifiers, the film can feel so painfully, hilariously relatable: It’s about being angry all the time when you have no real reason to be—about seeing the world so cynically you make the lives of everyone around you, everyone you love, just that much more miserable.
Chris isn’t a bad guy, either. Barinholtz plays him in The Oath as he did the dad in Blockers: a genuine person just trying to do what’s right for his family, bound every now and then to lose control, to make mistakes, but otherwise a decent adult human being. Chris witnesses the world around him devolve into political madness, goes to protests every now and then and goes to his office job every day, addicted to his phone and cable news, wishing everything weren’t so wrong and unfair and generally flabbergasted when other people, especially his family members, don’t agree. Still, he’s got a loving wife (Tiffany Haddish, whose performance consistently grounds the movie’s hyperbole), a bright daughter (Priah Ferguson) and a beautiful suburban house big enough to host his family over Thanksgiving—a holiday which happens to fall on the day before the deadline for signing the so-called “Loyalty Oath,” declaring one’s fealty to the faceless President of the United States. Barinholtz seems to understand—especially in how quickly his naturalistic studio comedy devolves into bleak violence—that not only are many of us pretty much terrified of how closely disaster looms, but that such a contrived situation, overtly fascistic but hilariously couched as a way to get some easy tax benefits, would have five years ago seemed too ridiculous to ever happen. Today? Sure, why not.
Chris’s family is traditional dad Hank (Chris Ellis) and doting mom (Nora Dunn); Chris’s campus conservative brother Pat (Ike’s brother Jon Barinholtz) and Tomi Lahren-like girlfriend Abbie (Meredith Hagner); and Chris’s sister Alice (Carrie Brownstein), towing with her an assortment of nuclear family members (including her sick husband, played by Jay Duplass, who is barely in the movie and the audience can infer will serve as the deus ex machina), and like her brother, a lefty with little to really lose. As everyone arrives at Chris’s and deep-seated arguments over political divides find plenty of fuel in the impending deadline for signing the Oath, Chris discovers more and more about the supposed ideals of his family members, his self-righteousness eventually exploding and ruining everyone’s holiday. He, like so many of us, can’t let anything the fuck go.