Carnal desire is on everyone’s mind in Josh Lawson’s directorial debut The Little Death. Deriving its title from a French euphemism for orgasm, the film is a sex comedy anthology telling five loosely connected stories of fetishism and dysfunction. Both male and female perspectives are voiced, and the kinks range from quirky to disturbing. The topic lends itself to the potential for a biting satire on selfishness, sexual dishonesty and the consequences these things yield, but The Little Death is not heavily concerned with these things. It’s a trifle of shallow pleasures, unfortunately, let down by one too many tired gags and a series of contrived, somewhat clumsily assembled plots.

The film wastes no time wrestling the audience from its comfort zone with an opening scene in which a woman hesitantly confesses about a long-held rape fantasy. The tension is broken when her boyfriend humorously mishears the admission, and the sequence sets the tone for a comedy of blunt words balanced out by charming misunderstandings and exaggerations. Masochism soon gives way to roleplay tested out by a couple experiencing communication problems. Suggested by a relationship counselor, the practice helps reinvigorate their bedroom encounters, but the husband starts to take the acting too seriously after an offhand compliment. Elsewhere, a woman manipulates her significant other for the arousal brought on by his tears, a family man is stimulated by his abrasive wife’s “sleeping beauty” state, and a signing tele-interpreter mediates a lonely deaf man’s call to an impatient phone sex worker.

Lawson’s intentions are a bit tricky to pinpoint. While much of The Little Death is content to coast on bubbly kinkiness and wacky complications, it occasionally takes a turn into darker territory, with a handful of morally questionable character decisions posed as playful, and a pair of uncharacteristically brutal conclusions. At the same time, it strains for blushes and raised eyebrows by courting tabooed subject matter while also infusing unearned romantic sentiments in an attempt to stir sympathy for terribly repulsive and single-minded characters. The confusion leads to mixed feelings and a slightly inconsistent tone, but there are bigger issues threatening to tear down what starts out as mildly enjoyable, amusing fluff.

The greatest shortcoming of The Little Death is its structurally problematic script. To call an anthology “episodic” wouldn’t be so much of a put down as it would be a simple descriptor of the genre’s trappings, but the trouble with Lawson’s film is that it doesn’t fully commit to that format. Each tale is largely isolated to its own figures and events, but a few characters briefly cross into other stories for no discernible reason. A sense of the broader community is never established, and these peripheral characters wind up looking out of place, especially when Lawson goes for a bewildering Crash­-style intertwining of narratives toward the end (one that doesn’t even include all the plot strands).

As it is, the individual segments are insubstantial. Held together by little more than sexually fueled scenarios and a whiff of relationship drama, there’s an absence of significant forward movement or development in these stories. They come off as extended situational skits with tacked on conclusions instead of complete arcs with a beginning, middle and end. Despite the looseness of it all, there is still a feeling of over-complication and a logically flawed progression. A pair of unnecessary subplots—one concerning a dead relative and the other a lost dog—only lead to neat conveniences, and an ill-conceived “neighborhood perv” character pops in and out of the film as a predictable distraction. Each extraneous addition adds a shot of black humor but fails to be very productive in the long run.

But all is not lost, as the film’s cast is a consistently dependable saving grace. Befuddled reactions are natural, plainspoken naughtiness is nicely timed, and each couple is compellingly genuine. It certainly helps that the actors have a good deal of wryly funny dialogue to work with, and almost everyone plays off each other well. A hint of staged direction and an irritating predilection for overly insistent music threatens to derail the cast’s work but doesn’t fully wash away the goodwill that the performers engender for the film.

In what is mostly a mediocre experience, The Little Death strikes gold for an entire 15-minute sequence toward the end. It’s the deaf interpreter story and, unlike the other segments, it plays out over the course of a single scene. The scenario carries the potential for something uncomfortable and raunchy, but it surprisingly isn’t either of these things. Sex talk ensues, of course, but the affair becomes sweet and endearingly offbeat in a way that nothing else in the film really matches. The scene is compact, has a degree of edginess, and has a fun, simple concept. It’s an outlier, but it’s a delightful one.

Those seeking out a titillating comedy may be enticed by The Little Death’s various bawdy premises, but will likely end up disappointed by a quintet of plots that only go skin deep. It’s an unambitious film, and one that plays it relatively safe when it comes to the physical act so little should be expected. Even taking its meager goals into account, the film falls short of the mark. It would be a gross overstatement to view it as an unsightly stain on the rich tapestry of a storied genre, though. The memory of it merely drifts away. The Little Death is a one-time fling that has its moments but ultimately fades by the light of the morning after.

One probably expects a film starring Keanu Reeves would be filled with action, but aside from one scene (two if you count watching him eat an entire cupcake), Generation Um is a slower character-driven film that plays off Reeve’s cool, calm, and collected demeanor. Mark Mann’s feature debut is a day-in-the-life snapshot of three flawed friends in New York City, but because the characters themselves are uninspiring and uninteresting, the film is as well.

The film begins on the morning after a night of partying as an escort-service driver named John (Keanu Reeves) drops off two of his chatty escorts, Violet (Bojana Novakovic) and Mia (Adelaide Clemens), at their Lower East Side apartment. While the two females are looking to sleep off the wild night, John takes a long stroll around the city. He aimlessly wanders from a neighborhood bakery where he enjoys a cupcake to a pawn shop with cameras in the front window and then back home to his rundown apartment. John carries himself has a rather gloomy fellow, but he seems to be in deep thought as if he is at a crossroad in his life.

Everything suddenly changes when John seizes an opportunity to steal a video camera from some people at a park when they are not looking. Now that he is equipped with a video camera his gloomy demeanor fades and it sparks a sense of purpose inside him that previously did not exist. John is completely infatuated with the camera and immediately uses it to capture his walk through the city park. Before long he turns the camera towards his two escort friends to document their lives.

The transition from being just a film to being more of a documentary-within-a-film is undeniably more interesting, despite the fact it feels mostly contrived. John instantly becomes a documentary filmmaker and the girls allow him to film their private life without any hesitation. However, this does allow for a completely different view of the characters because we discover intimate details about themselves and their past. The problem is that their lives are really not all that interesting and there is no real reason why the audience should start caring about them at that point.

Even though it was a welcoming change to see Keanu Reeves in such a small indie film, I cannot help but wonder what he saw in the film to begin with. The logical answer is that he saw something in the script that the film simply was not able to achieve. On paper Generation Um probably sounds more ambitious than it plays out to be. But regardless of the film turned out, his performance was effortless despite playing a frustratingly impenetrable character. Reeves does a good job at not stealing any scenes. In fact, he does the opposite by preferring to be behind his camera rather than speak in most scenes.

There are a lot of things that go wrong in Mann’s film, but what stands out the most is how incomplete it feels. Far too much time is spent watching John eat meals and not enough time explaining why he lives with his younger cousin or why the $75 birthday check from his mother has “medication” in the memo line. Generation Um presents itself in a way that is open for interpretation, but there is no real motivation for a viewer to construe anything.

The saddest part about Generation Um is that the most authentic part of the film does not appear in the actual film itself, but rather in the footage during the ending credits. That is because we finally see John open up just a little bit by cracking a smile and joking around with his friends, a small breakthrough that never actually happens in the film. Generation Um brings little to the table; very little emotions, nothing very meaningful or even particularly interesting to say, and it fails to explore the portrait of any generation as the title might suggest. The only part of the title that is relevant is ‘Um’.