Matt and Mara – first-look review

The titular couple of Kazik Radwanski’s latest realist dramedy aren’t actually a couple – but when they get mistaken for one by a photographer taking their passport photos, Mara (Deragh Campbell) plays along. She’s actually married with a young daughter, while her friend Matt (Matt Johnson) is a caddish singleton with his eye seemingly on every bright young thing in the Greater Toronto area. The two went to college together, both with aspirations of being writers, but that was years ago and their paths have diverged somewhat.

While Matt has published a successful short story collection and spent time living in New York, Mara settled down with experimental musician Samir (Mounir Al Shami) and started teaching prose and poetry at a local college. Returning to Toronto, Matt barrels into Mara’s life again, turning up at one of her classes.

Despite the disruption, the pair fall back into an easy friendship, bickering like no time has passed at all. Radwanski’s charming, well-observed dialogue reflects the experience of plenty of elder millennials, caught between the unrealistic expectations of ageing parents and the realisation that creative possibility under the constraints of capitalism is harder and harder to achieve. Matt briefly represents the possibility of another life to Mara – one where she feels more creatively compatible with her partner. But while Matt is charismatic, he’s also selfish and patronising, stuck in a state of arrested development. Perhaps it isn’t so much Matt, but what he represents, that Mara finds enticing.

Radwanski’s frequent collaborators Campbell and Johnson (who both appeared in his previous work, including How Heavy This Hammer and Anne at 13,000 Feet) have an easy chemistry together, and their predicament is likely to strike a chord with anyone who’s ever contemplated the seven-year itch. It also might seem similar to Celine Song’s fabulously successful 2023 drama Past Lives, similarly about a female writer questioning her relationship once a figure from her past reappears, but Matt and Mara is more observational and lo-fi in methodology. The naturalistic camerawork and performances ground the film in realism, creating a wry dramedy that refuses to placate us with easy answers or condescension.