WOBBLE PALACE

2.5 stars



“They say we’re a generation of narcissists,” says Jane (Dash Nekrasova), one half of the doomed couple explored in the amusing but cringe-y Wobble Palace. “But it’s not like we have anything else besides student debt and front facing cameras.”

Jane and her boyfriend, Eugene (Eugene Kotlyarenko), are trying one last-ditch experiment to possibly save their relationship—they’re splitting up the apartment they share for the weekend (Eugene gets Saturday and Jane gets Sunday).

The film starts from the perspective of Eugene, a self-styled weirdo who wears an elaborate man bun/combover hybrid that he calls the “floating toupee.” He immediately logs onto Tinder and tries, ineptly, to romance a series of women. Eugene calls himself a nice guy, and maybe he is, but his desperation to get laid comes off as creepy.

Next we see things through the eyes of Jane, who is only marginally more appealing than her oddball beau. At least she seems to have some moderate talent as an artist—she decorated the couple’s aggressively quirky apartment (think Astroturf and baby doll heads). But she frets the whole film about whether or not she’s “basic” and is rather cruel to Eugene.

Wobble Palace, which Kotlyarenko directed and co-wrote with Nekrasova, is very much of its moment, almost to a fault. At times the film feels rather explicitly anthropological, like a treatise—albeit a funny one—on millennial narcissism in the mid-2010s. (Look for already outdated phrases like “Bernie Bro,” “cuck,” and “basic bitch”!)

Still, young audiences will recognize themselves and their friends and be amused. It’s hard not to laugh at these characters, but a little harder to care about them.

