josh radnor | the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: Afternoon Delight

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2014.

Middle class attitudes towards sex are weird. Middle class attitudes toward middle class attitudes toward sex are particularly weird. Afternoon Delight is a film about the complexities around those attitudes, but it’s written from a point of view very grounded in that middle class perspective. There’s a sense that Afternoon Delight isn’t anywhere near as cutting and subversive as it wants to be, working hard to develop the character of “sex worker” McKenna only to throw it all away for a biting climax. (No pun intended.)

There’s a suffocating heavy-handedness and profundity to Afternoon Delight, a movie that edits a casual afternoon surfing on the beach as if we’ve wandered into a life-and-death scenario. There are wonderful moments of levity and wit in Afternoon Delight, but the film works far too hard to keep them boxed off and contained.