Funny Story 2018 Movie Review

『A tangled web of mistakes, betrayal, and the true story of forgiveness』

🎥 Film Overview

🎬 Title: Funny Story (2018)
🌍 Country: 🇺🇸 USA
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Comedy / Family
🗓️ Production & Release: Cinemand, 2018, Feature Film
⏳ Runtime: 85 min
📢 Director: Michael J. Gallagher
🖋️ Screenplay: Michael J. Gallagher, Steve Greene
📺 Platform: Amazon Prime Video and others

👩‍💼 Cast: Emily Bett Rickards – Kim
Jana Winternitz – Nic

🧩 Story Deep Dive (Spoilers)

🚗 The irony of the title: not a “funny” story at all

The title Funny Story is, in fact, a deliberate irony. While it outwardly takes on elements of a comedy and road movie, beneath the surface lies a story filled with infidelity, betrayal, and fractured family ties. The film’s humor is therefore a thin layer covering deep emotional wounds.

• Balancing black comedy: Director Michael J. Gallagher and co-writer Steve Greene manage to handle what could easily become a melodramatic premise (a father sleeps with his daughter’s fiancée) through dry, awkward humor. The uneasy laughter that arises from the characters’ selfish and childish actions serves to highlight the tragic undertones even more.

• Immature adults: The film portrays adults who act childishly when faced with crisis. Gallagher noted that he wanted to make “a mature story about immature adults,” stressing that true forgiveness and reconciliation require emotional responsibility—something the characters consistently fail to demonstrate until too late.

🧨 The ironic blend of selfishness and pain

The film’s success depends almost entirely on the strong performances of its leads and their ability to embody deeply flawed, painfully human characters.

• Walter Campbell: the fallen actor’s path to redemption
  • A washed-up TV actor from the 1980s, Walter is narcissistic, impulsive, and self-centered. Hoping to become a better father figure for his young pregnant girlfriend, he tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Nic. Torn between good intentions (reconciliation) and selfish motives (guilt avoidance), his impulsive decision to sleep with Kim drives everything into chaos. Matthew Glave masterfully balances Walter’s arrogance and underlying fragility, making him both pitiable and infuriating.

• Kim: grief and defensive cynicism
  • Having just lost her mother, Kim is consumed by anger, grief, and bitterness. She is Nic’s best friend—and her fiancée. Emotionally adrift, she enters an affair with Walter and later wrestles with guilt and denial. Emily Bett Rickards captures Kim’s defensive energy and emotional volatility with nuance, grounding the film’s dramatic weight.

🌀 Moral Dilemma: To Tell the Truth or Not?

After Walter and Kim’s one-night mistake, the film revolves around the central question: “Is telling the truth always the right thing to do?”

• The complexity of honesty: If Walter confesses to Nic, she must face two shattering truths—her father’s infidelity and her partner’s betrayal. Yet silence would mean beginning a marriage built on deceit. The film uses this impossible situation to invite viewers into a moral gray zone, where no choice feels right and every truth has a price.

• Sexual identity as secondary: Interestingly, Nic’s identity as a lesbian and her relationship with Kim function only as background context for the film’s main theme—the universal pain of betrayal. Though Walter’s awkwardness toward his daughter’s sexuality briefly surfaces, the drama’s core focus is not queer identity itself but the devastation caused by deceit within intimate relationships.

🧠 Kim’s Betrayal and Nic’s Vulnerability

The heart of the film lies in Kim’s inability to process her grief and emotional confusion in a healthy way—her choice ultimately contaminates her relationship with Nic.

• Nic’s ignorance and purity: Nic remains blissfully unaware of what transpired between Walter and Kim. She is in a state of joy—reuniting with her father and preparing to marry Kim. This purity amplifies the weight of the secret and creates tension, as viewers anticipate the inevitable emotional collapse when the truth emerges.

• The destruction of trust: Nic’s love and her tentative reconciliation with Walter are both built on fragile trust. Kim’s betrayal shatters not only that trust but also the foundation of Nic’s forgiveness toward her father—representing the total collapse of relational integrity.

• Nic’s lack of insight: The film never fully explores how Kim and Nic fell in love or what binds them emotionally. As a result, it’s difficult to discern whether Kim’s affair was a spontaneous mistake or the outcome of deeper emotional dissatisfaction. Nic’s failure to perceive Kim’s instability or Walter’s recklessness suggests that their relationships were fragile and ill-prepared for crisis.

😷 “Silence” as the worst possible choice

Kim’s greatest sin is her decision to remain silent before the wedding—an act of cowardice disguised as protection. She tells Walter, “We can’t hurt Nic,” but in truth she is trying to spare herself from loss and shame. Her silence turns Nic’s happiest moment into one built upon lies and hypocrisy.

• Kim’s final hypocrisy and collapse: Even after Walter’s confession, Kim tries to downplay the incident and blame him. Yet when Nic demands accountability—“Aren’t you going to take responsibility for this?”—Kim finally admits, “I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing.” This breakdown reveals that her betrayal stemmed from emotional instability rather than malice, and that her love for Nic was not strong enough to heal that void.

✨ A Bitter Reflection on Relationships and Forgiveness

Funny Story uses the breathtaking landscape of Big Sur, California, as a stark contrast to the inner chaos of its characters. While some critics point to uneven pacing or thin backstories, strong performances by Matthew Glave and Emily Bett Rickards lend emotional gravity to the film.

Ultimately, this is a film about forgiveness. It argues that forgiving others begins with recognizing and forgiving one’s own flaws. Beneath its deceptively light title, Funny Story delivers a bittersweet reflection on how messy, unpredictable, and painfully human life can be—a poignant gem among independent dramas.

🎯 Personal Rating

💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★★