SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT

In The Roses, Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch embrace a movie season of not- so-romantic comedies

- BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

IN THEIR 1980 SONG OF THE SAME NAME, THE J. Geils Band sang, "Love stinks," and boy, they weren't kidding. In love, there are no guarantees. Infidelity, free-floating resentment, mutual loathing, garden-variety boredom: sometimes it seems there are more forces to drive couples apart than to hold them together. No wonder the romantic comedy, in which meant-to-be lovebirds find their way to a happy ending, is one of our most cherished genres. Sometimes, though, it feels good to look the beast of love-gone-wrong directly in the eye.

A recent spate of darkly glittering comedies give us the opportunity to do just that. Forget the summer of love; this has been the summer of our grumbling discontent. Welcome to the age of the anti-romantic comedy. In writer-director Michael Shanks' horror-comedy Together, a codependent couple falls prey to a mystical force that literally glues them together. Michael Angelo Covino's Splitsville—which bills itself as "An Unromantic Comedy"—turns the idea of open marriage into a cracked slapstick symphony. Oh, Hi!, co-written and directed by Sophie Brooks, riffs on the idea of women who want too much too fast, and the men turned off by it. And Jay Roach's black comedy The Roses, which traces the slow decline of a once in-love couple, may not so much make you laugh as cackle with bitter recognition—or maybe a shudder.