The most dangerous movie a first-time director can make is the one about the man who never became who he meant to be. Noah Millman made that movie on purpose. Resentment, his debut as a writer and director, locks three people in a Brooklyn cocktail bar for one long night and lets them tear each other apart over the exact wound Millman spent a career circling: the terror that you waited too long, that the work you were meant to do has already passed you by. It is a brave, uncomfortable, verbally violent little film, and the reason it lands as hard as it does is that the man behind the camera clearly knows the feeling from the inside.
Consider the setup, which is almost cruel in its symmetry. David, played by Patch Darragh, is a filmmaker who never actually made a film, a mid-life man drowning in booze and obsolescence. His old friend Coleman, played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr., is a finance guy who crossed over into filmmaking and actually finished something, a horror picture he has now hired David to help him cut. And Trish, played by Jen Ponton, is David’s wife, who owns the bar, and who David has convinced himself is sleeping with Coleman. So the humiliation is total and layered. The failure has to fix the success’s movie while suspecting the success is also taking his wife. Over the course of one afternoon that curdles into last call and past it, those buried grievances detonate one at a time.
Here is the news, a beat behind the point. Resentment is available now to rent on Amazon Prime Video and Fandango at Home, with Buffalo 8 handling distribution worldwide. Go in knowing what you are getting.
What makes the film worth writing about is that Millman is telling on himself. Before he ever stepped behind a camera, he spent sixteen years in finance while writing and developing on the side, a critic and essayist who helped produce other people’s movies before finally making his own at mid-life. Read that biography against the plot and the trick becomes clear. Coleman, the finance guy turned filmmaker, is Millman’s own arc. David, the one who never pulled the trigger and rotted from the resentment of it, is the ghost of the life Millman was afraid of living. He split himself in two and staged the argument. That is not a gimmick. That is the whole engine, and it gives the film a self-implicating honesty you cannot fake. Millman has said he wanted to build a world that takes audiences somewhere disturbing and uncomfortable, and that he hopes they are glad to have visited it anyway. The confrontation that sparked the script was a real one, with a real old friend, which goes a long way toward explaining why the dialogue draws blood the way it does.
Millman knows exactly which tradition he is working in, because he names it himself. Resentment reaches straight back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the gold standard for the booze-and-blood chamber drama, where a marriage and an evening and a bottle become the arena and the talk does all the killing. This is a hard lane to work in. It is the highest of high-wire acts, because there is nowhere to hide. No chase, no spectacle, no cutting away. Just faces and words and the slow removal of everyone’s armor. When it works, there is little in cinema more electric. When it does not, it feels like being trapped at the worst dinner party of your life. Millman is betting the whole picture on the words, and that bet is the most respectable thing about it.
The cast is built for exactly this. Lawrence Gilliard Jr. has been quietly excellent for more than thirty years, from The Wire to The Deuce, one of those actors whose face you trust on sight, and handing him a lead instead of a supporting slot is its own small pleasure. Patch Darragh, familiar from Succession, gets the showiest and saddest job as David, the man who has to make self-pity compelling for the length of a feature. Jen Ponton grounds the whole thing as Trish, the one with the clearest eyes in a room full of liars. Three character actors, no movie stars, doing the kind of talky, exposed work most modern films are too nervous to attempt.
I should be straight with you, since I have not yet sat with all eighty-two minutes myself. This is a divisive picture, and it splits along exactly the fault line this tradition always splits on. Some viewers have found it electric and brutally honest. Others have found the talky, almost theatrical construction self-indulgent, a filmed play that never fully becomes a film. Both reactions are probably fair, depending entirely on your appetite for watching people say devastating things to each other in one room. If that reads like a warning, it is not. It is a description of a genre, and Resentment is squarely inside it.
Here is the practical rundown, kept in one place. Resentment runs eighty-two minutes and is available now to rent on Amazon Prime Video and Fandango at Home, with Buffalo 8 handling worldwide VOD, streaming, and music publishing. It is the first feature Noah Millman has written and directed, and it stars Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Patch Darragh, and Jen Ponton. You can dig into the credits over at IMDb, or read more at the film’s official site.
So here is my flag in the ground, contradictions welcome. I do not know yet whether Resentment fully earns its long dark night, whether the last drink lands the way the first one promises. But I know this. In a marketplace that keeps ordering filmmakers to make the safe thing, the pre-sold thing, the four-quadrant thing, a mid-career first-timer made a stark, mean, ambitious chamber drama with three actors and a bar and a whole lot of nerve, and then laid his own deepest fear on the slab to do it. That is the kind of swing this site was built to celebrate, hit or miss. Pour something strong and find out for yourself. Just do not expect anyone to walk out of that bar unscarred.
