David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano’s I Don’t Understand You is a comedy that doesn’t so much flirt with darkness as it marries it, then sets the honeymoon suite on fire. Starring Nick Kroll as Dom and Andrew Rannells as Cole, the film is a neurotic, queasy, and often hilarious descent into moral chaos disguised as a gay adoption drama. It’s a movie that wants to be about love, family, and the absurdity of fate—but ends up being about murder, cover-ups, and the strange elasticity of ethical boundaries when a baby is on the way.
The premise is deceptively sweet: Dom and Cole, a wealthy couple from Los Angeles, are celebrating their tenth anniversary in Italy while awaiting news from Candace (Amanda Seyfried), the birth mother of the child they hope to adopt. What begins as a romantic getaway quickly devolves into a series of increasingly grotesque accidents and decisions. The couple kills four people—one by accident, two by panic, one by vehicular distraction—and incinerates the bodies in a pizza oven. Then they fly home to become dads.
As a comedy, the film is hit and miss. Kroll and Rannells have a sharp, neurotic chemistry that carries much of the film’s tension. Their bickering is precise, their panic believable, and their moral unraveling is played with a kind of manic restraint that makes the horror palatable. The supporting cast—Nunzia Schiano as the tragic Zia Luciana, Morgan Spector as the misunderstood Massimo, Eleonora Romandini as Francesca—adds texture, but the film’s tone often wobbles between farce and dread. It’s funny until it’s not, and then it’s funny again, but you’re not sure you should be laughing.
As a gay comic film, it’s refreshing in its refusal to sentimentalize. Dom and Cole are not paragons of virtue. They’re flawed, privileged, and increasingly desperate. Their queerness is not the joke—it’s the context. The film doesn’t lean on stereotypes or rainbow platitudes. Instead, it asks: what happens when two men who want to be fathers find themselves in a situation that tests every moral fiber they claim to possess?
As a murder comedy, it’s effective in its pacing and escalation. The deaths are absurd, the cover-ups even more so. But the queasiness sets in when the film begins to treat these killings as part of the couple’s test. The idea that incinerating bodies and lying to police somehow earns them the right to parenthood is deeply unsettling. The final scenes, where they return to the U.S. and are shown living happily with their son, Giovanni, feel like a betrayal of everything the film seemed to be interrogating. The reward feels unearned, the moral arc unresolved.
This is where the title I Don’t Understand You becomes more than a throwaway line. It’s the film’s thesis. Dom and Cole don’t understand the people around them—the farmer, Luciana, Massimo, Francesca. They don’t understand Italy, or the language, or the customs. But more importantly, they don’t understand each other. Their reactions to crisis diverge, their ethics fracture, and their shared goal—becoming fathers—becomes a justification for increasingly indefensible behavior.
The title is a confession, a lament, and a warning.
The film is not without merit. It’s bold, strange, and often hilarious. But it’s also morally slippery, and its ending undermines the discomfort it so carefully builds. It wants to be a comedy about love and murder, but it is about getting away with it. Whether that’s a flaw or a feature depends on how much ambiguity you’re willing to stomach.
Grade: B. Streaming on Hulu
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