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MeI’ll be honest with you – hopeless devotee that I am, cheating sex wasn’t enough on my bingo cards for 2026. But then Alice and Steve come to prove me wrong! It’s nice to discover that life still has ways of surprising you.
The characters are best friends and have been since they met at university, 30-plus years ago. Alice (Nicola Walker) is on her second marriage, to a sweet, content beta man (Daniel, played by Joel Fry) to an alpha-woman; she is 10 years younger than him. They have a teenage son, and have raised their daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith) since she was a child. Izzy is now 26 years old and has just returned home after breaking up with her boyfriend.
Steve (Jemaine Clement) is a hairdresser, single since his wife left him four years ago. “I wish I could fall in love and have a child,” he tells her as they drink their grief after their friend’s funeral. “You deserve to be loved,” says Alice, and advises finding a young woman who can do this and giving her a baby piercing.
Guess what? 10 minutes later he is on Alice’s couch with Izzy who he has known since birth. It’s good because Izzy is a reliable 26-year-old girl who knows what she’s thinking and she came to him, a man she’s known since childhood. And this is the first big sign of the big problem in the whole project: to come up with an idea that has a big element of ick, and its success will depend on the serious use and questioning of ick, the creator Sophie Goodhart spends all the time running away.
The poor man, we are given to understand over the next six hours, who feels immovable, is not a wild animal. Just a little weak and lonely. This means that instead of asking the hard, interesting questions while this tumultuous establishment is unfolding – about the difference in natural power and whether ignorant people are controlling events related to knowledgeable people of any kind – we come closer to nodding “What can a person do?!” a vibe that feels old and wrong.
We’re supposed to sympathize with Steve because he sometimes tells Alice that he’s upset about the relationship and what it’s doing to him, but nothing about him or his actions pays off. The fact that your best friend’s daughter likes Willie Nelson while twenty other people you just tried to chat with in the bar have never heard of him doesn’t make it work. We are told over and over again that sex is unspeakable. I suspect that half of these lines had to be added when it became clear that the chemistry between the actors was lacking. Margalith does her best, but Clement looks embarrassed throughout.
Alice quickly becomes aware of the relationship, goes to the far end and sits there. It’s not so much a moral thing. Alice starts to become impulsive and selfish – indeed deep selfishness may be the only thing she and Steve have in common – and remains so through several borderline-imbecilic attempts to destroy their relationship. He invites the two of them and Izzy’s young friends to a dinner party and makes an angry fool of himself. This is mostly continuous; the man’s lack of compassion would be a worthy lesson. He’s written so boldly as a genius – given nothing but a ferocious rage to speak in a scene that could be described in detail and mystery – so that even a talented actor like Walker couldn’t do anything else with the part.
Several unexpected twists and turns occur. A very touching and believable relationship develops between the son Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce) and his crush Rome (Eilidh Fisher), although they are not included in the main story, and Daniel’s silent suffering is more moving than anything else shown. And the ending is silly but a whole piece with a big story in which nothing is certain or true and nothing is discovered or resolved. The ick is the least of Alice and Steve’s problems.
