Life
Fantasy Life review: ‘I think I suffer from internalised antisemitism’ ★★★
In this neurotic and funny film, Matthew Shear plays a failed tax lawyer who’s ashamed of being Jewish
October 31, 2025 10:49
In this neurotic and funny film, Matthew Shear plays a failed tax lawyer who’s ashamed of being Jewish
October 31, 2025 10:49High anxiety runs through actor director Matthew Shear’s comedy. He plays Sam, a 30-something failed tax lawyer who hasn’t had a girlfriend for five years.
“I think I suffer from internalised antisemitism,” he tells his psychiatrist, played by Judd Hirsch, whose still impeccable timing lends a false sense of security to this movie. For Hirsch’s presence cannot hide that in patient Sam this film has a charisma-shaped hole.
When the psychiatrist’s wife and secretary asks our doubtful hero if he might babysit her three granddaughters, for her rock musician son David (Alessandro Nivola), Sam’s narrow life becomes embedded in the life of the children’s mother Diane, a former film star with a dormant career played by a superb Amanda Peet.
While Diane’s husband David tours Australia for three months, Sam takes on the role of the children’s “manny”.
It could be said that Shear generously underwrites his role, allowing Peet’s to take over. Beyond Sam’s anxiety there is little going for the fellow who mostly presents as a kindly yet monosyllabic klutz.
Peet, however, suppresses what must have felt like a natural choice of being annoyed by Sam’s presence every time they share a scene. But that is not the way Shear’s script goes. She must instead fall for him, at least a bit.
Disbelief is just about suspended by the nuance of Peet’s performance, which not only conveys the bleak sense of loss an actor experiences when her star status fades but the shame of being “a wealthy white woman” who sees herself as a victim. Shear and Sam are lucky to have her.
Fantasy Life is being screened as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival on November 10 at Picturehouse Central www.ukjewishfilm.org
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