Adult Best Friends Review: Real Friendship Transfers To Screen
Streaming Movie Review - Comedy - VOD
Carrying a friendship from childhood to adulthood can be tricky. Often, our first friends are simply a matter of geography – who did we grow up next to or sit beside in school. As we age and discover more of who we are, those friendships fade, not out of malice but because shared interests no longer connect us. In Adult Best Friends, now out on VOD, real-life best friends Delaney Buffett and Katie Corwin explore this changing friendship dynamic.
When Katie (Katie Corwin) gets engaged to her boyfriend, John (Mason Gooding), she worries about how to tell her sullen best friend, Delaney (Delaney Buffett). In order to break the news gently, Katie decides that they should go away for a girls’ weekend to the beach they loved to visit as kids. Katie struggles to be honest with Delaney, afraid that sharing this news will tear them apart. However, as they meet the recently engaged Charlie (Connor Hines) and his friends, the secret becomes more challenging to keep, and the friends must wrestle with the way they have changed since they were girls.
Adult Best Friends does a lovely job of showing the evolution of friendships between adults while also looking at the broader theme of learning to accept change. Co-writers Buffett and Corwin are long-time friends, and they brought an exaggerated version of themselves to these characters. Even with this exaggeration, it is easy to relate to these women as they navigate this next significant change.
Corwin and Buffett balance each other really well in their performances. While they do have a somewhat dark and light friendship, neither is reduced to a caricature. Cory Walls's Dougie, the overly enthusiastic and rule-bound owner of the bungalow they rent, is a little over the top but provides a good bit of comic relief when the scenes start to get tense. The other members of Charlie’s wedding entourage are relatively forgettable, but Hines brings a down-to-earth vibe to his scenes that help remind us that both Katie and Delaney have areas where they need to grow.
For the most part, the story in Adult Best Friends works well. While I liked the inclusion of Charlie, his friends felt like they muddled the story. When the film focuses on the relationship between Katie and Delaney, it works incredibly well. When we start to drift away from the two of them and their immediate friends, it feels like it loses the flow. If we were going to expand the additional characters, I would have loved to see more from Delaney’s co-workers, who are fantastic.
Changes happen all the time, and even when they don’t result in the end of a friendship, they can alter the way that those relationships move forward. Marriage is obviously a big one for many people, but there can be any number of small shifts that can cause rifts between friends. Adult Best Friends is a reminder that they don’t have to spell the end.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on February 28, 2025.