The Filmmaker Who Knows What’s Wrong With Your Relationships

If the writer-director Nicole Holofcener could predict the future, she’d guess that no matter what happens to the planet, no matter how much human society evolves and devolves, our descendants will still get emotionally distressed over something small, petty, and entirely irrelevant to anyone else. People hurting each other's feelings, she told me over Zoom last week, is “going to happen until the end of the world.”

Injured feelings can easily become personal doomsdays, as her latest film makes clear. In the appropriately titled , a couple’s marriage fractures when an unexceptional writer named Beth (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her husband, an unexceptional therapist named Don (Tobias Menzies), criticizing her latest novel—which he secretly thoughtis what’s consuming you?”