Lionsgate Films
Quintessential eternal bridesmaid Nellie Robinson (Leah McKendrick) constantly finds herself between weddings, baby showers, and bad dates. When she begins to feel like the clock is ticking and is faced with bleak romantic prospects, Nellie decides to freeze her eggs — setting her on an empowering journey to a brave new world where she ultimately discovers “the one” she’s looking for might be herself.
REVIEW:
Lionsgate Films
Scrambled is a millennial fertility comedy where the single woman, Nellie (the director, writer and star Leah McKendrick) facing her biological clock expiration date decides to freeze her eggs. The problem: she doesn’t produce enough and most undergo fertility treatments. The whole glorious and grueling process is shown and satirized from outside to inside reaction.
Lionsgate Films
Nellie is a hard partying, sexually forward woman who is now forced to mature and earn her potential parenting stripes by exercising understanding, patience, abstinence and routine. In other words, she becomes an adult. Scrambled contrasts Nellie’s short “best if sell by date” conception opportunity with men who have a much longer shelf life. Her brother snidely remarks that he can wait to start a family well into his seventies. That kind of sexual injustice makes for the brunt of the comedy and the movie’s fevered urgency.
Lionsgate Films
Scrambled was inspired by McKendricks own experiences with fertility therapy. The antagonist here is not men but her own slightly uncooperative reproductive system. Time is messing with her everlasting party mentality. Freezing her eggs gives her the opportunity of delaying motherhood a little longer, giving her the time advantage that men enjoy. It also allows Nellie to be sexually equal to her more fertile peers, not always be the odd one out at baby showers. Scrambled gives her a successful egg freezing party at the end, filled with he/she gender reveal balloons and all the practical gifts expecting expecting mothers will need.
Lionsgate Films
Scrambled does spend a lot of plot attempting to be a failed romantic comedy. Intercut with all the frequent fertility clinic visits and hormone injections are intertitled dates with potential husbands- the prom king, the nice guy, the Peter Pan. They’re basically cringey sketches that bring out the best and worst of Mckendrick’s acidic and cynical observations of the male species. They exist to give Scrambled romantic comedy credentials.
Lionsgate Films
McKendrick delivers a gamey down to earth performance with a cast that is content to be perfect straightwomen and sexual male scapegoats for Nellie’s anger and resentments. The film is inspired and unique in its first half- always finding fresh and naughty minded material in the cliched situations that come up. Eventualky it runs out of steam and succumbs to formula contriving increasingly credulity-stretching scenarios to get Nellie’s self-empowerment and strength-through-sisterhood arcs where they need to go.
Scrambled gets a 3.0/5 or a B. It’s streaming on Hulu.
CREDITS:
Directed by
Written by
Leah McKendrick
Produced by
- Gillian Bohrer
- Jonathan Levine
- Brett Haley
- Amanda Mortimer
Starring
- Leah McKendrick
- Ego Nwodim
- Andrew Santino
- Adam Rodriguez
- Laura Cerón
- Clancy Brown
Cinematography
Julia Swain
Edited by
Sandra Torres Granovsky
Music by
Production
companies
- Megamix
- BondIt Media Capital
Distributed by
Release dates
- March 11, 2023(SXSW)
- February 2, 2024(United States)
Running time
100 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Language
English
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