It does not help that David’s sister Abby is turning up with her disdainful boyfriend Benjamin who David’s neurotic, serial screw-up of a younger brother Adam (who harbours deluded ambitions of joining the IDF) hates for making him feel like the nebbish that he is. Nor will tensions be soothed by the fact Meg’s Catholic parents are coming to the dinner.
From here it is perhaps best to allow Robbins, who is speaking to me on a video call from New York, to convey the final element that makes this shabbos so bad.
“My co-writer Zach [Weiner] and my producer came up with the idea of film about an authentic Shabbat dinner with a dead body. I said, ‘Wow, that could be a great movie.’ Like, if someone told me that existed, I would watch it tonight, which is usually the barometer. So I got really excited. And then we said, ‘OK, well, what would it look like?’”
For structure and inspiration Robbins turned to The Birdcage, the American version of the French classic comedy La Cage aux Folles in which the son of a gay drag nightclub owner is introduced to the conservative parents of the son’s girlfriend.
“So we thought, OK, Jewish boy, non-Jewish girl. And then someone had the idea of what would happen if the girl’s parents came over for the first time,” says Robbins.
Yet none of this would have clicked into the delightful comedy that Bad Shabbos became without the pivotal character of the apartment block’s doorman Jordan, who is played to perfection by the Wu-Tang Clan rapper Method Man. When the chicken soup hits the fan, it is Jordan who helps to keep his favourite Jewish residents of the block out of jail. “We’ve crossed the Red Sea and their ain’t no going back,” he tells them.
Forty script drafts, and 30 failed pitch meetings later the film was looking like it would never get off the ground until Robbins’ producer managed to raise the money privately.
“Individuals just stepped up,” says Robbins. “We were like, we want a Jewish story to be told. Everyone knew indie films don’t usually make money but they were prepared to try it. Thankfully, it’s worked out.”
The resulting movie is big on Jewish ritual. Candles are lit, brachos are intoned, attendees must arrive by foot (though not everyone does).
“Zach and I met at our yeshiva high school in New York City. Half our day was secular classes and half was Jewish. So I was the Jewish consultant on set. My parents were relieved that, you know, all that tuition was finally worth it. We just thought we haven’t really seen modern Orthodox Judaism portrayed authentically and if we get that right then we would have a comedy that is special.”
The makers of the film first knew they had a hit at New York’s Tribeca film festival. “It was like a concert with 360 people rolling with laughter almost non-stop. We won the Audience Award, which was nice,” says Robbins, who is the first in his family to venture into film. His father and grandfather are engineers. His mother worked for the ambulance service and was a school nurse.
“My plan was always to be an engineer. But in high school I was one of the funny kids and there was this thing where we had to make videos. I made one in a junior year with my friends and it just lit a certain spark.”
Despite the acclaim and the fact that Netflix has licensed the movie in the US, the film, which is yet to find a distributor in the UK, has had its detractors. Most, predictably, centre on the film’s references to the IDF. In one scene David’s younger brother Adam is wearing an IDF T-shirt, but what really gets the goat of many online critics is that reference is made to Israel’s conscription army that is not condemnatory.
When he is talking about his sister’s boyfriend, Adam also comes out with the IDF-esque line: “I won’t start it, but if he does something, I’ll respond with full force.”
“We wrote and shot the film before October 7,” says Robbins. “Someone asked us how we had predicted events and I replied, guy, it happens every seven years.
“The reason the character of Adam exists is because we wanted to make an authentic depiction of an Upper West Side family. There were kids in my grade who were obsessed with joining the IDF and it was just a character type that was funny and authentic. People have said we should take it out, and it has certainly made people uncomfortable. But I think that if you sterilise comedy, you lose your edge, and then you’re not funny any more.”
Rapper Method Man as Jordan[Missing Credit]
Might a fairer criticism of the film be the almost stereotypical setting of New York Jewish comedies?
“You’re right. The Upper West Side is where Seinfeld takes place and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We set our film there because Zach’s parents live on the Upper West Side, it’s what we know. We didn’t really overthink the literary criticism or optics. [We just thought] write what you know and what warms your heart and hopefully it will connect to others.”
The film may have changed the life of Robbins who, until Bad Shabbos, has mainly made films in the horror genre. Beast Within was an early project in 2016.
“The only thing I could pitch was other horror movies,” says Robbins. “Even though Zach and I just love comedies we couldn’t get any made because people would say we’ve never made one before. But now I can, and hopefully we can get another comedy going soon.”
Might a Bad Shabbos sequel therefore be in the works?
“We had an idea for one but comedy sequels are hard because they’re so premise-based. And they are often not funny the second time round. We’ll see. We have a couple of other ideas. One of them is Jewish. It’s a Chanukah movie.”
Bad Shabbos is screening at the UK Jewish Film Festival at Curzon Mayfair on November 16. www.ukjewishfilm.org
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Film-maker Daniel Robbins[Missing Credit]