Adulthood opens with a jolt in a quiet suburb: Meg and Noah Robles discover a body hidden in their parents’ basement, a revelation that upends their carefully managed lives and sets off a suburban misadventure. The 30-year-old corpse is kept in a space their parents once called the ‘playroom,’ a detail that frames the film’s satirical take on family legacies.
Noah Robles, played by Josh Gad, is a fundamentally sympathetic you-are-not-in-control type: a failed screenwriter in an Alamo Drafthouse T-shirt with maxed-out credit cards who quips that he knows how cops think. Meg, portrayed by Kaya Scodelario, is a working mother juggling Zoom meetings, a school schedule and a child’s glucose monitor, and she loses her cool when pressed. As the discovery climbs from a secret to a crisis, more bodies surface, along with extortion and a cast of heavies who look the part but may not be as dangerous as they appear.
Director Alex Winter and screenwriter Michael M.B. Galvin stage a taut, satirical black comedy that inflates the tension without abandoning a sharp, dry sense of humor. The film inverts the usual crime-mystery arc: the danger comes not from a single monster but from ordinary people trying to cover up an extraordinary mess. A scene set against a child’s flag-football game interrupts the suspense with a pointed domestic moment, underscoring the movie’s balance of everyday life and crime.
Gad and Scodelario carry the film in alternating bursts of steadiness and panic, delivering performances that feel grounded even as the plot spirals into extortion, slicing violence and the occasional frantic misunderstanding. The humor comes from pragmatic exchanges about leaving no trace—“You should put some towels down,” one character notes—so the violence never feels purely gratuitous; it instead reads as a consequence of trying to preserve a fragile, comfortable life.
Beyond the suspense, Adulthood probes questions of legacy and the humanity of parents—how adults are capable of mistakes, and how those mistakes echo through their children. The movie maintains a measured tempo that keeps the tone closer to dark comedy than melodrama, a balance some viewers may find refreshing in a genre that can veer toward either bleakness or frantic spectacle. If you’re seeking a Fargo-like blend of wit and menace, Adulthood delivers a compact, well-acted package.
The film runs 97 minutes and carries an R rating for violence, language throughout, drug use and brief sexual material. It opens in select theaters on Friday and will stream on Sept. 23. Critics have praised its restraint and tonal finesse, noting that the story’s themes—family, obligation and the lure of keeping secrets—resonate without overstaying their welcome.