‘The Parenting’ Fizzles as Both Horror and Comedy

Scary Movie didn’t establish the idea of horror comedy, but it did become one of the most durable movie franchises in the genre, with five feature films premiering between 2000 and 2013 and a sixth currently in development. So when Kent Sublette was writing The Parenting, which will become his first produced screenplay when the film premieres tomorrow on Max, Scary Movie had to have been at least in the back of his mind. The creative minds behind Scary Movie — the Wayans Brothers for the first few, and Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker later on — come from TV sketch comedy, and the Scary Movie movies are less driven by plot than a series of sketch-like comic setpieces. Sketch dominates Sublette’s background, too — he wrote on Saturday Night Live from 2007 through 2024 — but The Parenting doesn’t feel as sketch-y as its horror comedy forebear. Maybe I would have had more fun if it had.

The Parenting revolves around a weekend at a country rental house for longtime boyfriends Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn). If the property manager Brenda (Parker Posey) seems a little strange, who could let it ruin the trip when the rate on this gigantic home is so affordable — suspiciously so, you might say! Josh and Rohan’s respective parents are also coming to stay, and while the young couple have spent time with one another’s families before, this will be the first time both sets of parents are meeting each other. 

Rohan is extremely tense about everything he’s arranged for the getaway going exactly as planned. This includes Josh impressing Rohan’s tight-assed parents, so Rohan convinces Josh to lie about having just been fired from his job. Josh then accidentally puts Rohan at a deficit by making their friend Sara (Vivian Bang) think she should come be a buffer even though Rohan’s mother Sharon (Edie Falco) can’t stand her. Sharon is just hard to please in general, though: a retired psychologist, which she mentions more than once, she pretty obviously looks down on Josh’s parents Liddy (Lisa Kudrow), formerly a receptionist at the high school where Cliff (Dean Norris) was teaching math. Rohan’s architect father Frank (Brian Cox) is distracted and distant right up until he reads the wi-fi password out loud; then, he starts making himself the center of attention by slashing Josh’s arm with a bread knife, bellowing homophobic insults and appearing in common areas completely nude. In other words, Frank’s really not himself.

Meeting a partner’s parents under any circumstances has inbuilt horror potential; add the intimacy of sharing a vacation house, and incorporating paranormal activity almost feels redundant. One guest opening a bathroom door on another using a toilet in an entirely conventional way is arguably the movie’s biggest jump-scare, and that’s well before any demonic force makes its presence known. There’s also inherent horror in a home-share rental. At least at first, Brenda is probably only a few notches more off-putting than the weirdest Airbnb host you’ve ever interacted with. Between this and the current third season of The White Lotus, no one is having more fun this Lent than Parker Posey.

It’s established early that Frank and Sharon adopted Rohan, and that both Sharon and Rohan have spent their relationship anxious not to let each other down by falling short of perfection: touches like this ground the story when the presence in the house starts popping off. Speaking of which: the filmmakers mostly keep the special effects at a manageable scale — a gnarled arm here, a spray of vomit there; a major reveal in the final act isn’t executed as effectively as the more lo-fi gags are. I personally could have done without the simplest effect, in which one of the dogs Liddy’s looking after for the weekend has a mishap with a heavy piece of furniture. Because the supernatural is involved (or because the movie’s poorly edited), the outcome is somewhat ambiguous. Still, I’ll repeat what I wrote here two years ago: please stop killing dogs for laughs!

There are other issues. Dodani and Flynn are very appealing and game, but they start bickering before their couple chemistry is really established, making it hard for me to invest in them as the film’s central co-protagonists. Even Frank, early on, seems like he’s more sexually attracted to Josh than Rohan is, a plot thread I thought might pay off eventually and didn’t. Because all of the elder actors are such seasoned pros — no surprise, a scene in which Sharon and Liddy take a break from the demonic incursion by drinking white wine together is the best in the movie — I kept wanting to return to them whenever Josh and Rohan were on screen, failing to elevate the material the way their screen parents do with ease. The skill gap between generations ends up making the movie feel lopsided.

But ultimately it just isn’t as funny as I know it could have been because Sublette is also the writer behind this demented House Hunters sketch from a 2018 episode of SNL.

I’m old enough to remember when you could just stretch a three-minute SNL sketch to 30 times its original length and put it in theaters, and if that had happened here, I would go. The Wayne’s World movie has a simple plot that plays out in sketch-like, nearly self-contained scenes; that could have worked here too, but failing that, The Parenting could have at least borrowed more of this sketch’s peculiar energy. I understand wanting to nod to the well-known movie tropes about haunted houses and demonic possession, but since we also know your references and can guess where they’re going to take the story, plot can (and should) be less important than funny bits. Instead, The Parenting fizzles as horror and as comedy. And if you’re still considering watching just for the Brian Cox nude scene? Don’t bother. It’s probably a stunt butt.