Give Or Take

This film fits neatly into the ongoing trend of male bonding dramas, centering on two men—one straight and one gay—whose lives become intertwined following a shared loss. While the underlying concept is good, the execution fumbles the potential. The movie fails to provide proper explanations at the beginning or resolutions at the end, and the focus is frequently diverted by various side characters and storylines that should have remained with the two leads. The narrative would have benefited significantly from more digging into the characters’ histories.

Following the death of Kenneth, his estranged son Martin travels from New York back to the family home in Cape Cod, ending years of no contact. Martin is unaware that after his mother passed, his father entered a relationship with his gardener, Ted, who is now left grieving alone. Forced to sit across from one another, these two strangers—the son and the partner—must navigate funeral arrangements and the reality of life moving forward. Because the man Ted describes with such love bears little resemblance to the father Martin remembers, their dynamic shifts between being weirdly funny and genuinely sad. The tension centers on the house: Martin views it as something to sell, especially with a relentless real estate agent constantly appearing to push that agenda, while Ted wants to stay in the place where his entire relationship with Kenneth lived. Martin, however, is not in a rush to hand over what he considers his right to deal with. The film gives both men a fair hearing, avoiding making either one the obvious villain. While an old friend of Martin’s returns with her family, briefly pulling him back into his Cape Cod childhood, the film primarily runs on the friction between the grieving, raw Ted and the closed-off, uptight Martin as the latter attempts to sort through a tangle of things he has been avoiding for a long time.

This film poses profound questions: how do you process the loss of someone with whom you never found peace, and how do you endure sitting with another person’s warm, beautiful memories of a person who caused you pain? It is made clear that Martin is not anti-gay, yet he struggles to comprehend that his father spent decades concealing his true identity. What truly stings is the realization that the open, warm, beloved version of his father was present for Ted and the entire community, but was nowhere to be found when Martin was a child and genuinely needed him. Ted is also grappling with his own burdens—grief, anger, money stress, a lack of a clear career path, and a general sense of being unmoored—which leads him to act out. However, all of these struggles would carry much more weight if we understood who Ted was before Kenneth entered his life. The film’s biggest deficiency is this missing backstory; without it, Ted feels less like a complete person and more like a mere collection of reactions. While the actors do a decent enough job with the material provided, the script would have been much more satisfying with tighter writing and more character history. The budget is obviously limited, but Cape Cod looks beautiful on screen, and the film maintains a quiet sweetness even during frustrating moments. Ultimately, the ending just shows up and resolves itself without having really earned it. (6/10)