The first American Pie movie came out more than 25 years ago, but Jason Biggs is still playing the neurotic, put-upon suitor/boyfriend. Including in a new movie that he also directed in his feature debut. The film is called Untitled Home Invasion Romance, and while its premise isn’t promising, the execution is better than you’d think. And it reached back to the spirit of the dark comedies of the late-1990s, although more Very Bad Things than American Pie.
Biggs plays Kevin, a middle-aged struggling commercial actor whose marriage to his wife, Suzie (Meaghan Rath), has hit a rut, after the two of them met and married quickly a couple of years earlier. So he comes up with a long-shot plan: While they’re away for a romantic weekend at what was her childhood home, he’ll stage a home invasion, with his friend posing as the assailant. Therefore, Kevin can play the hero and impress his wife.
It goes awry, and the rest of the movie involves the characters trying to cover things up and avoid consequences, as secrets emerge from Suzie’s past. Arturo Castro plays Kevin’s friend, fellow actor, and accomplice. Anne Konkle (from Pen15) is the police chief and Suzie’s old friend, and Justin H. Min (from After Yang) is Suzie’s ex-girlfriend, a defense lawyer.
The breakout, here, is Rath, a Canadian actress with whom I’d been unfamiliar; her most notable previous role was in a few episodes of Hulu’s How I Met Your Mother spinoff. But she’s very good here, in a performance that allows her to play a lot of different notes. The film does one thing I really liked: it drops strong hints that it’s going in one particular direction, and then shifts gears and goes with a completely different ending than I expected. And the actual ending works better than the one I had in mind.
Biggs does a decent job handling the different tonal shifts. And at a time when so many movies pad out their runtimes, this one is a brisk 85 minutes. Untitled Home Invasion Romance was written by Joshua Paul Johnson and Jamie Napoli, and while it feels like something that would’ve made the Black List, it won a different screenwriting contest—something called the Script Pipeline Screenwriting Contest—back in 2017. At the time, it had a title (Getaway), becoming “Untitled.” Untitled Home Invasion Romance was released straight to VOD, on a Tuesday for some reason, and I don’t get the sense it made much of a splash. But it deserves to find an audience.