While watching Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard I had the silly thought that the experience seemed similar to what it might be like to watch someone put on a two-hour theatrical using a doll house and brightly costumed dolls. In the same way a child playing with dolls is apt to exaggerate movements and voices to animate soulless toys, so do the performances and tableau of the film feel embellished and dream-like.

Shailene Woodley plays Kat Connor, a teenager deep in the throes of sexual awakening and exploration. Her mother Eve (Eva Green) disappears when Kat is 17, failing to return from the grocery store one day. Through flashback, Eve’s emotional decline is evident in her interaction with her husband Brock (Christopher Meloni) and her seething disdain for his every loving sentence, action, and breath. Leading up to her disappearance, Eve’s interactions with Kat — especially when her boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) is present — get more and more vindictive. Strutting about in mini skirts and waking Kat in the night to slut shame her only scratch the surface of her paranoia and desperation in her housewife life.

After Eve disappears, Kat and Brock find their way through life. Kat goes to therapy to discuss her feelings and, more often, lack of feelings about her mother’s displaced status. She goes to college. She dates new boys. She takes up smoking.  It isn’t until she visits home during a school break, checking in with her old friends (Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato) and meeting her dad’s new girlfriend, that a conversation with now ex, Phil, causes her to question everything she thought she understood around her mother’s disappearance. Revelations that casts every relationship she has into question.

To think of White Bird in a Blizzard as a mystery would be mostly inaccurate. Mystery implies suspicion, and until very late in the film, there is none of that. Even the temptation to classify it as a character study feels wrong, as everyone is clearly filtered through Kat’s immature and narrow-sighted purview. In her eyes her mother is a drama queen, her father is a coward, Phil is a disposable sex toy, and Detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane) isn’t important for his work on her mother’s case, but instead as an example of the raw manly sexual ideal Kat’s decided is most attractive. And all of this would work just fine if the film’s ending didn’t throw real emotional revelations into the mix and expect us to accept them despite having spent all our time in a dream world until then.

As for performances, Eva Green and Christopher Meloni play their doll house roles with amazing style and energy. At first almost Stepford wife scary, Eve is robotic with her mannerisms and sharp in her candor. It starts out as off-putting and by the end is absolutely entrancing. Similarly as Kat’s idea of a wimp, Brock literally slumps his shoulders, hands hanging aloof at his sides, his every sentence exuding the cluelessness of a man trying to make sense of the marriage that’s crumbling in front of him and a daughter he holds little connection to. It’s almost hard to watch. Both deserve accolade, but Woodley’s Kat shows little signs of maturation despite the passage of time or the intensity of the truths she discovers by the end of the film, though I will hand it to her, she has teenage rebellion down pat.

Her lack of development may be due in part to what is clearly the film’s biggest failing, and that is the rushed ending. It’s possible the novel the film is based on spent a similarly short amount of time on the plot’s twists, but certainly its slower format in general must have given its readers more chance to process the information they are given. In the film, the editing fails by focusing on the wrong things, not allowing us enough growth with Kat to feel the impact of her self-revelations. It’s hard not to want her to care more about her life, though to give the film due credit, it well reflects the selfish preoccupation teenagers have in prioritizing their lives according to their daily dramas.

Another badge Gregg Araki deserves is in the perfectly curated music of the film and a great score from Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie. Full of great ’80s fare it’s worth staying through the end credits to create a playlist from the offerings, including Cocteau Twins, The Psychedelic Furs, and New Order. The art direction is equally enthralling — a well-crafted picture of the ’80s with a touch of ’50s sensibility.

Many beautiful elements and strong performances make White Bird in a Blizzard a stimulating watch, but its utter lack of real emotion do great injustice to the cruelty of loss and the very real emotions flooding through the average teenager at any given second. Kat’s only passion seems to be sexual, giving her an impractical flatness on which the entire film falls. Araki, known for reveling in unpleasant material in earlier films such as Mysterious Skin, manages to direct all discomfort into watching each characters’ overblown identity play out on-screen, while rushing past the hairy exposition without allowing it some influence. It’s just too hard to care for the story endings of dolls.

If you grew up with a sibling close in age as you there is a good chance you can attest that sibling rivalry is very much a real thing. This competitiveness between family members has been depicted a lot throughout the history of cinema, from award winners The Godfather II and Ordinary People to the more recent Duplass brothers’ The Do Deca Pentathlon. Borrowing several filmmaking techniques from the latter, Awful Nice is an off-kilter comedy about two brothers who get so caught up competing with each other that they completely tune out everything else around them. The film focuses solely on the wild misadventures between these two family members while mostly ignoring logical plot lines, and Awful Nice is an amusing ride as long as you do the same.

It comes as no surprise that the best scene of the film is near the beginning where the two brothers fight while attempting to find an old Alonzo Mourning rookie card, as this scene comes straight out of Todd Sklar’s short film entitled ’92 Skybox Alonzo Mourning Rookie Card. The scene authentically captures what it is like when two adolescent brothers bicker back-and-forth in their room about frivolous matters. But what makes this situation, and other situations like arguing over what hockey posters should be hung on the wall, so amusing is that these two brothers are actually middle-aged men who have never let go of their sibling animosity. However, this scene establishes more than just their childish behavior. Dave (Alex Rennie) and his irrational beliefs are shown when he is convinced the card is worth way more money than it actually is, while his brother Jim (James Pumphrey) is pretty much the polar opposite—a levelheaded college professor who is married and has a child—informing his brother just how much he overestimates the collectables market.

After spending a long time apart from each other, Dave and Jim are reunited after learning of their father’s passing. The fact that the brothers care more about their inheritance than their father’s death reinforces their childlike behavior, but is nonetheless bizarre. At the funeral they discover they were left the family’s lake house in Branson, Missouri—though the place is a dump and needs a lot of fixing up before they can sell it for money. They claim to have good intentions to use this opportunity to bond with each other, though it comes as no surprise that they spend the majority of the time yelling and hitting one another.

Sibling rivalry, in the form of drinking contests and arm wrestling, are common occurrences in Awful Nice and typically end up with punches being thrown. And while the physical comedy that ensues mostly flourishes, it does begin to grow tiresome by the end. Some of the gags in the film linger on screen longer than they really need to and a couple simply fall flat. Although the film really shines in the dialogue department; not because it is terribly insightful, in fact some of it will test your frat boy tolerance, but because the sharp banter between the brothers feels very genuine.

It is nearly impossible to avoid comparisons between Dave’s neurotic character in this to the equally eccentric Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia—both have wild-card personalities who are not afraid to eat straight out of the garbage or sport American flag attire. But more than just a similar character, Awful Nice employs comparable humor and a storyline that could easily be found in an episode of Always Sunny. While being compared to a popular television show should be considered a compliment, the main problem with the film is that it attempts to fill 90 minutes with roughly 30 minutes worth of material.

Even though the plot is razor thin and some of the punch lines, such as “That’s coming out of your half,” are overused, Awful Nice ends up being mostly amusing. It is diverting to watch reckless characters pop pills, take shots, have run-ins with local police and Russian thugs, and order $90 specialty drinks from a prostitute/waitress. However, Awful Nice is filled with so much erratic slapstick comedy that by the third act the film begins to feel exhausting, making one wonder if sticking to a shorter episodic structure would be better than a single full-length film.

Awful Nice trailer