With couples therapy movie The Intervention, Clea DuVall recalls The Big Chill

Movies are very good at show­ing the nuanced, complex rela­tion­ships that exist between friends, as the 1983 classic The Big Chill demonstrated. That film, which was directed by Star Wars and Indiana Jones scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan, brought a group of thirty-somethings together after the suicide of a friend; past truths were revealed and relationships reassessed in the light of the tragedy.

Thirty-three years later, actress Clea DuVall’s directorial debut The Intervention takes a similar tack, although this time a gentle humour is more to the fore, and the dramatic scenes are much lighter in tone.

The story concerns a group of friends who converge on a country house intent on forcing a couple to talk about – and then end – their unhappy marriage. The main orchestrators of the gathering are Annie (Melanie Lynskey; Togetherness), who likes to drink, and Jessie (DuVall), who’s worried about her relationship with her cheerful girlfriend, Sarah (Natasha Lyonne; Orange Is the New Black).

But the argumentative couple don’t take kindly to their friends’ attempts to get them to talk it over, and the focus soon shifts to the personal lives of others in the group. We learn that problems aren’t always noticeable, and that even among close friends, things aren’t always what they seem.