Every Other Week
2021 · 11m · United States
Directed by Ryan Wagner
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tender
Kevin enters his therapy session with an agenda, but his counselor Patty announces their time together has run its course — a comedy about the blurred line between the professional and the personal.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the therapy comedy to be about the patient's breakdown, so Wagner flips it—making the *ending* of care the punchline, which means the real subversion is tonal: watching two people negotiate intimacy through its dissolution. It's the kind of move that feels obvious in hindsight and completely invisible until someone does it right.
The film's formal restraint—contained almost entirely within the session itself—recalls a lineage of chamber pieces that trust dialogue and performance over visual spectacle, and Wagner's handling of the emotional architecture, where comedy and tenderness occupy the same breath, suggests a deliberate conversation with films like *4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days* about the weight of professional boundaries.
The entire film hinges on Wagner's decision to let Patty (the counselor) deliver the news with her *back to the camera*, which inverts every therapy scene expectation—suddenly Kevin's reaction becomes the thing we're reading, and that single framing choice transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely funny and achingly human.
Reviews
The script is sharp and the humour really lands and a lot of the credit has to go to just how believable the relationship between Kevin and his therapist feels. With Every Other Week Sturgis and Wagner find a real sweet spot between feel-good comedy and earnest emotion, making its selection for our platform an easy decision.