{"id":43189,"date":"2026-09-20T23:54:44","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T06:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/?p=43189"},"modified":"2026-09-20T23:54:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T06:54:44","slug":"resentment-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/reviews\/movies\/resentment-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"RESENTMENT: Last Call For Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Three people. One bar. Years of disappointment, jealousy, ambition, alcohol, marital frustration and unspoken desire. Put them together over the course of a single night, keep the drinks flowing, and eventually somebody is going to say the thing that can’t be unsaid.<\/p>\n

Writer\/director Noah Millman understands that the most dangerous weapon in RESENTMENT isn’t a gun or a knife. It’s familiarity. David (Patch Darragh), his wife Trish (Jen Ponton), and longtime friend Coleman (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) know enough about one another to identify precisely where the wounds are\u2014and, when sufficiently provoked, exactly where to press.<\/p>\n

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Structured in three distinct sections\u2014Betheca, Kayla and Tanya\u2014RESENTMENT continually shifts the dramatic balance among its central trio while remaining rooted almost entirely within Trish’s Brooklyn bar. Each chapter rearranges the emotional geometry, allowing alliances, suspicions and resentments to mutate as afternoon gives way to evening and ultimately last call.<\/p>\n

At the center of the first section are David and Coleman. Coleman has done something David has spent years trying to do: he has made a movie. Worse still for David’s ego, Coleman has hired him to edit it.\u00a0\u00a0David is not taking any of this well.<\/p>\n

Self-pitying, jealous, alcoholic and capable of being a complete ass, David has elevated dissatisfaction into something approaching a personal philosophy. He regards himself as an artist whose life somehow failed to deliver what his talent deserved, while Coleman has committed the unforgivable offense of actually accomplishing something.<\/p>\n

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Patch Darragh has the considerably less glamorous task of making David’s relentless self-pity watchable, and he nails the unlikeable sad sack without sanding away any of the character’s rough edges. Even David’s clothes seem defeated; every piece he’s wearing looks as though he slept in it. It’s an inspired visual extension of a man marinating in disappointment, alcohol and the conviction that life has somehow failed him. Darragh understands that making David sympathetic isn’t the assignment. Making us understand the bruised ego beneath the bitterness is.<\/p>\n

Standing opposite him, Lawrence Gilliard Jr.’s Coleman could hardly present a sharper contrast. Polished and commanding in a crisp dark suit that complements his skin tone, not a wrinkle to be found, Coleman takes obvious pride in his appearance, carrying himself with the immaculate bearing of a movie executive from another era.<\/p>\n

And nowhere does Gilliard shine more brightly than during the Betheca section and a killer Act One monologue. David may be sitting across from Coleman, but cinematographer Valentina Caniglia and her camera effectively put us in David’s chair, allowing Gilliard to deliver much of the monologue straight down the lens. His gaze is unwavering, his concentration absolute. He can gesture, smile, sneer or let the words do the cutting, but those eyes never relinquish their hold. Coleman has David pinned in place, while Gilliard has us just as securely riveted to the screen.<\/p>\n

But this isn’t merely David and Coleman’s battle. Trish is the lynchpin around which both men\u2014and ultimately the film\u2014turn.<\/p>\n

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Jen Ponton has perhaps the trickiest balancing act of the three as Trish, a woman who has learned how to navigate David’s self-pity without surrendering herself to it. Ponton gives her a grounded, matter-of-fact strength that never needs to announce itself. One of her best moments comes when David’s martyrdom turns to the movie he never made and the money he never asked Trish to provide.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could have asked me for it,\u201d she tells him. \u201cDoesn’t mean I would have given it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Ponton’s hands, the line is both devastatingly funny and remarkably revealing. Trish refuses to allow David to transform his failure to ask into some noble sacrifice made on her behalf. He didn’t give her the opportunity to say yes\u2014or no. And Trish, unlike David, appears perfectly comfortable owning either answer.<\/p>\n

But Ponton gives us much more than the sensible wife managing a self-pitying husband. Put Trish behind her bar and there is no question who commands the room. Ponton’s posture changes, her confidence expands and she seems to take possession of the space around her. Put her beside Coleman and the weary frustration she brings to David gives way to something looser, warmer and increasingly playful\u2014a sidelong glance, a knowing smile, an ease that gradually becomes flirtation. Ponton makes those shifts without ever making Trish feel inconsistent.<\/p>\n

David reacts. Coleman attacks. Trish adjusts.<\/p>\n

And Ponton lets us see every adjustment while maintaining the sense that, of the three, Trish understands the room\u2014and the two men occupying it\u2014better than either understands himself.<\/p>\n

That command becomes overtly physical when Trish climbs atop the bar and dances for Vincent. Ponton throws herself into the moment with fearless abandon, using Trish’s sexuality not as decoration but as another expression of a woman who knows how to seize control of a room\u2014and every pair of eyes in it.<\/p>\n

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Yet RESENTMENT also gives Ponton moments of quiet interiority. Caniglia is particularly expressive when she turns the camera inward. One beautifully composed shot finds Trish alone with her reflection, her face isolated within an ornate oval mirror while another framed image sits softly out of focus beside her. Frames within the frame, the composition creates a moment of visual and emotional introspection. Stripped for a moment of David and Coleman as immediate points of engagement, Trish has no one to manage but herself. Ponton responds with remarkable stillness, allowing the confidence and command we’ve seen elsewhere to fall away as something quieter and more contemplative registers across her face.<\/p>\n

Caniglia frames the reflection; Ponton gives us the woman inside it.<\/p>\n

And Caniglia’s cinematography is integral throughout, refusing to allow a dialogue-heavy film confined largely to a single location to become visually stagnant. Camera movement, framing, perspective and lighting evolve as the relationships do. What begins with greater control becomes increasingly restless as emotional control deteriorates, while later movement develops a more fluid quality as the balance among the characters changes yet again.<\/p>\n

Particularly effective is the visual distinction between two sexual encounters involving Trish. The earlier office sequence is colder and more observational, while the later encounter on the bar is warmer, more fluid and subjective. Caniglia and editor Emil Benjamin give the sequences completely different emotional textures. They may involve the same woman, but they emphatically do not involve the same relationship, and the filmmaking ensures we feel that distinction.<\/p>\n

Benjamin’s editing proves invaluable elsewhere as well. With three principal characters, extended dialogue and one dominant location, pacing could easily have become the film’s undoing. Instead, Benjamin finds rhythm within conversation\u2014knowing when to hold on a face, when a reaction is more valuable than the person speaking, and when movement can relieve the pressure created by prolonged stillness. The editing allows conversations to breathe without letting them go slack.<\/p>\n

And what a location in which to spend all that time.<\/p>\n

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Production designer Dan Prosky creates a bar so beautifully realized that one can almost smell the wood, liquor and accumulated years within its walls. Brickwork, dark woods, green leather, paned doors and partitions, and a magnificent back bar glowing with amber bottles give the space warmth, texture and history. Valentina Caniglia’s cinematography takes full advantage of Prosky’s design, finding depth within a confined location and allowing practical lamps, backlighting and shifting pools of warm and cool illumination to subtly alter the emotional temperature. This isn’t merely a believable working bar; it’s a place you want to walk into, pull up a stool and stay awhile.<\/p>\n

Costume designer Willa Piro is equally attentive to character. David looks as though he slept in every piece of clothing he’s wearing, while Coleman’s crisp dark suit is immaculate, not a wrinkle to be found. And then there’s Trish, whose colorful, body-conscious wardrobe suits both her personality and her ownership of the room, right down to the playful bar-straw combs tucked into her hair. Nothing feels arbitrary; before these characters tell us who they are, their clothes have already started doing the talking.<\/p>\n

Sound and music further extend the bar beyond what we see. Alexander J. Morgan’s work complements the environmental sounds of bottles, glasses, conversation and the outside world, while music feels organically embedded within a functioning establishment rather than pasted onto the film to manufacture emotion. The cumulative effect strengthens the sense that this place continues to exist beyond whichever two characters happen to occupy the foreground.<\/p>\n

But the most delicious piece of RESENTMENT’s construction arrives when Coleman starts talking about his own movie.<\/p>\n

It’s a monster-in-the-house story. The family senses the monster before they can actually see it.<\/p>\n

And suddenly the metaphor is sitting there in plain sight.<\/p>\n

Coleman’s movie is David, Trish and Coleman.<\/p>\n

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The monster has been in this house\u2014or, more accurately, this bar\u2014long before anyone openly acknowledges it. The characters sense what’s happening before they’re prepared to articulate it. David would have to be willfully oblivious not to recognize the currents running between Trish and Coleman, while Trish would have to be equally na\u00efve to believe David senses nothing. But Coleman isn’t the cause of David and Trish’s problems. He’s the catalyst exposing fractures that were already there.<\/p>\n

That’s where RESENTMENT becomes more interesting than a conventional marital triangle. Coleman isn’t simply a threat to David’s marriage. He’s a threat to David’s conception of David.<\/p>\n

Coleman made the movie.<\/p>\n

David didn’t.<\/p>\n

And David must sit across from the man who did while being asked to work on that man’s film.<\/p>\n

It’s brutal.<\/p>\n

Alcohol steadily strips away whatever social varnish remains as accusation becomes confession, confession becomes provocation, and old grievances acquire new targets. Yet Millman wisely resists making any one of these people the uncomplicated villain or victim. They’re capable of insight about everyone except themselves. Each has a version of events in which his or her behavior makes perfect sense, and watching those competing narratives collide is where RESENTMENT finds its bite.<\/p>\n

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For all its talk, this is also a film about looking\u2014at another person, away from another person, straight down the lens, across a glass, into a mirror. Caniglia’s camera understands when confrontation requires movement and when the most powerful thing it can do is simply stay put and watch an actor’s face.<\/p>\n

And Millman trusts those faces.<\/p>\n

That trust pays off because Darragh, Gilliard Jr. and Ponton don’t merely deliver dialogue; they give us the years that existed before it. History hangs between them. Affection hasn’t disappeared beneath the resentment, which is precisely what makes the resentment hurt. If these three felt nothing for one another, none of this would matter.<\/p>\n

But they do.<\/p>\n

And by the time last call arrives, RESENTMENT has transformed one beautiful neighborhood bar into an emotional pressure cooker where the most intoxicating thing being served isn’t behind Trish’s glowing wall of bottles.<\/p>\n

It’s the truth.<\/p>\n

Written and Directed by Noah Millman<\/p>\n

Cast:\u00a0 Patch Darragh, Jen Ponton, and Lawrence Gillard, Jr.<\/p>\n

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by debbie elias, 09\/17\/2026<\/p>\n

RESENTMENT is now available on digital platforms.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n