You Hurt My Feelings
Cert: 15 | ★★★★✩

How truthful should we be with our loved ones? Should there be limits on honesty in relationships? And what happens when your nearest and dearest find out how you really feel?

These are the questions with which Jewish filmmaker Nicole Holofcener wrestles in her latest beautifully observed comedy.

In You Hurt My Feelings, the Enough Said star and Veep and Seinfeld alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays writer and professor Beth whose happy marriage is sent into a tailspin when she overhears her therapist husband Don, played by Outlander and The Crown star Tobias Menzies, discussing her first novel with her sister’s husband. He doesn’t think it’s any good.

The problem, of course, is that he has been telling Beth the very opposite, reassuring his wife of her talent and the novel’s commercial viability.
The truth of his feelings leaves Beth questioning both her writing abilities and her marriage: can she ever trust Don again?

Meanwhile, Beth’s interior designer sister Sarah, played by Michaela Watkins, is having a crisis of her own with a particularly difficult client.

And her husband Mark (Succession’s Arian Moayed, who’s every bit as excellent here) is also fighting demons. He is an aspiring actor who’s been fired from his starring role in an upcoming play and is overcome with feelings of inadequacy for it.

BD 24351 RC

Arian Moayed and Michaela Watkins (Photo: Just My Opinion Pictures Inc)

Don doesn’t get away with things either. In the course of the film, his clients find ways to criticise their therapist.

Holofcener tells a cautionary tale here about the cost of honesty and she does it with a comedic precision that is reminiscent of her Seinfeld days.

She navigates Beth’s melancholy and overreaction brilliantly and subtly asks the viewer: what would you do, and how would you react? How much unvarnished truth can you tell, and how much can you tolerate?

Around ten years ago, similarly themed New York cautionary tales were very much in vogue and I’ve no idea why Hollywood stopped making them.

Should Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings reboot the genre we will owe her a lot.

It’s a pleasure to spend time with her hugely relatable characters who, however smart and self-aware, need this to be confirmed by their loved ones.