Vague Visages’ Between the Temples review contains minor spoilers. Nathan Silver’s 2024 movie features Jason Schwartzman, Mo Chara and Dolly De Leon. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Grief can make neurotic assholes of the best of us, but for Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), the chaotic protagonist of Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, there are few signs that his outlook on life will heal alongside his wounds. A cantor long absent from the synagogue where he works, the protagonist first appears while running abruptly out of a service, frantically panicking about his singing abilities. Not long afterwards, Ben lies in the middle of the road, desperately asking an irritated lorry driver to run over him. His job is getting children ready for their own bat mitzvah ceremonies, but he couldn’t be accused of having the maturity required to lead them on such a key rite of passage. There’s a distinctly adolescent air about Ben, his flippant and casualized relationship to death little different to the melodramatic, morbid fantasies staged by the young protagonist of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971).

Ultimately, it’s Ashby’s canonized cult classic that Silver’s film bears the closest resemblance to, not least because Between the Temples is — in the broadest sense — a tale about the perspectives gained from an intergenerational relationship helping someone overcome their own neuroses to reconnect with the world. The most refreshing thing about Silver’s Sundance premiere, however, is its offbeat repudiation of the way viewers might expect to see this play out onscreen. In an indie film landscape where intergenerational relationship dramas have a certain formula to them — two mismatched outcasts emotionally grow together — there’s an inherent thrill to watching a writer/director brazenly ignoring that roadmap. With Between the Temples, Silver shows an awareness of dramedy cliches and takes great pleasure in making the audience’s skin crawl each time the narrative takes a sharp left turn from expectations.

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Despite the way Between the Temples deftly and subtly twists the knife on audience expectations for a specific type of “Sundance movie,” I found myself admiring its audaciousness without ever quite warming up to it. This has nothing to do with how Silver’s film will make anybody with a fear of awkward social interactions run screaming for the exits. Both the funniest moments (such as a third-act game of Telephone which spirals into anarchy) and the most surprisingly well observed (Ben’s conversation with a bemused priest) fall into this category, aspiring to make viewers’ toes curl (and mostly succeeding). However, at a certain point, this stops feeling natural and starts feeling too overtly calculated; the aforementioned Telephone scene builds up to a not-too-surprising emotional revelation in a manner that doesn’t ring particularly true. For all of its comparatively grounded style — helped, in no small part, by Sean Price Williams’ gorgeous 16mm cinematography —Between the Temples’ situations become just as heightened as the archetypal Sundance drama. There are too many laughs to write this off as a mere exercise in narrative subversion. At the film’s weakest moments, though, one can feel every twist of the knife a mile away.

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Between the Temples is the rare comedy where none of the supporting cast members manage to steal the show from the lead. Unsurprisingly, this is due to Schwartzman being no stranger to portraying myopic characters, but he’s managed to convey such figures as singularly frustrating personalities in the past — most memorably in Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip (2014). He approaches Ben with far more empathy, all without reducing the impact of his clueless self-destruction. I never got the impression that Silver shared a similarly compassionate view of such a flawed character. Without ever becoming mean spirited, Between the Temples does aim to hold its protagonist at the furthest remove possible, laughing at the character but never with him. 

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Silver’s filmmaking approach (in collaboration with co-writer C. Mason Wells) further serves the detachment from the comedy — not to mention the wider subject of grief, and Ben’s experience of it — which makes any dark laughs to be had in Between the Temples feel even less lacerating than they should. It’s hard to be affected by an ordinary man’s unusual crisis of faith when it feels like it’s designed to make the audience feel uncomfortable, instead of making one care. No matter how close Williams’ cinematography gets to the characters’ faces, there’s never any illusion that viewers can go deeper than what the harsh surface allows.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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