Thirty-five years after “When Harry Met Sally…” asked the question of whether straight men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way, “Matt and Mara” rephrases it with more anxiously fraught social stakes — raising the accompanying and ever-relevant query of whether two neurotic writers should really fraternize with each other at all. The fourth feature from Canadian writer-director Kazik Radwanski is an itchy, unsettled and often poignant relationship drama, consistent with his previous works not just in shared personnel — notably lead actors Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson, who also headlined Radwanski’s 2019 breakout “Anne at 13,000 Ft.” — but in a tingly, seasick storytelling sensibility that makes something volatile and cinematic out of ostensibly static material.
A decade or two ago, when the mumblecore movement was at its zenith in North American indie filmmaking, a trim, talky character piece like “Matt and Mara” — a highlight of this year’s Berlinale Encounters competition — might have seemed less of an outlier than it does on the 2024 arthouse scene. Which isn’t to say that Radwanski’s freewheeling, improvisatory approach feels dated or derivative. As with “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” a gnawing character study which ran on the quivery sense of characters and actors being pushed to the edge of their comfort level, his latest resists coziness even as it pursues a sometimes warm, sometimes raw intimacy between characters who know each other either too well or not quite enough, depending on what level of companionship they settle on.
At the outset, Radwanski’s fleet, on-the-fly script furnishes the audience with little backstory regarding its syllabically compatible title characters, instead trusting us to fill in their history (which turns out to be both simple enough and a little complicated) as we get to know them. Mara (Campbell), a thirtysomething creative writing professor at a Toronto university, appears to have several reactions at once — exhilaration and exasperation lapping each other on the actor’s remarkable, sharp-planed face — when Matt (Johnson), whom she hasn’t seen in several years, blusters unannounced into one of her classes.
It’s a typically brash, entitled stunt from a man whose cocksure personality and easy, dudeish tone have made him something of a celebrity on the New York lit scene, with multiple well-regarded novels to his name. Half a lifetime ago, they were close friends at college in Canada, and regarded as equally prodigious talents. Now Mara has gone the teaching route while still awaiting her literary breakthrough, and raising a young daughter with her husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami), a handsome, accomplished musician from whom she seems almost entirely disconnected. To mutual friends, she rather jarringly announces that she has no feeling whatsoever for music; the subtext is discomfitingly obvious.
Into this breach, calculatedly or otherwise, steps Matt — back in town for an indefinite period, and determined to work his way back into Mara’s life with his considerable force of personality. When they’re mistaken for a couple by a stranger, she runs with the charade, in part because her old friend brings a fizzy energy to her life that it’s been missing for some time, but perhaps more crucially because he reminds her of when her life was less placid and more promising. When Samir drops out of driving her to an out-of-town literary festival where she’s due to give a talk, Matt agreeably steps in — adding a charged stop to that most romantically auspicious of tourist spots, Niagara Falls, to the itinerary.
For much of the film, we don’t know exactly whether Matt and Mara’s first estrangement was merely a matter of geography and circumstance, or a more personally motivated rift. Yet the more time the reunited friends spend together, the edges of their relationship edging uncertainly into less platonic territory, we see the ways in which their respective vanities and insecurities chafe against each other, now exacerbated by age and past experience. Campbell’s and Johnson’s performances, both expert in aptly clashing registers, contribute to the unease: Her nervy, compressed intensity is initially tempered by his breezy jocularity before, in time, the two energies begin to aggravate each other.
Radwanski’s script is low on incident — and the film, at a tight, jittery 80 minutes, can afford to be — but this tension keeps it taut and urgent, in the manner of particularly gripping people-watching: Even Nikolay Michaylov’s restless, sometimes invasively close-up camera operates on a close interest in human nature itself, its gaze fixed keenly on its protagonists’ reactions to various miniature, everyday epiphanies and bombshells. “Matt and Mara” isn’t a relationship study where you especially root for the union of its title characters, but you can’t look away from them either way.
