Matt and Mara

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.

This lo-fi Canadian dramedy feels like an excursion into nothing much, as a vague college friendship is rekindled.

[Director Kazik Radwansk]’s drawn to characters who are hard to love but impossible to hate. In Campbell and Johnson he’s found two eager conspirators and brilliant actors.

If everything in the film feels so natural, so nakedly real, that is because everyone involved in it worked so determinedly to make that magic act happen. To bleed the manufactured into the organic.

A nebulous bid to capture the tension between a seemingly cozy marriage and a romantic fling, and between the academy and the outside world, “Matt and Mara” is less a movie than an idea for one.

The film offers no easy answer for their situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms&#59; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden.

Though some viewers might find the characters off-putting as they dance around their desires, anyone who’s ever been in—or witnessed—a similar situation is likely to be more forgiving. Plus, there are only so many films about male-female friendships.

A worse movie would lean into the romance, the forbiddenness of it all, but Matt and Mara isn't so vulgar.

It sounds like it should be a standard love triangle plot — the plot description makes it sound like something Michael Douglas might have starred in in the ‘80s — but that’s not really what this is

Johnson and Campbell are really good here in not overtly showing their cards as they navigate their reunited friendship. Films often botch these kinds of relationships and yet this one seems rightly modulated with that little hint of pain underneath.