How To Be Single (2016)

It’s extremely rare for this film fan to be offended by one, but Christian Ditter’s gangrenous portrayal of single life in New York is a far more putrid affair than John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), and indeed a more horrifying two hours to spend your time than lending it to Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Alice (Dakota Johnson) moves to New York after ‘taking a break’ from her boyfriend Josh (Succession’s Nicholas Braun) and moves in with her sister Meg (Leslie Mann) who we learn has absolutely no interest in having a relationship, and certainly not a baby.

Alice spends her time with Robin, her best friend and co-worker (Rebel Wilson) who supposedly teaches her the ways of being single- men buy the drinks, and then you sleep with them at the end of the night, as well as introducing her to a drink system that apparently exists between friends; that is, in every male/female friendship, there is a total number of drinks that, once you’ve hit between you, you’ll definitely have sex. This, staggeringly, is meant as an amusing set up to something that clearly will happen later, and despite the set up being about as amusing as a house fire, the scene in which this ‘system’ is put in to play is not only less amusing than its set up, it’s bordering on the troubling as well as demeaning.

How To Be Single is vile from beginning to end, and the parts that don’t involve the most loathsome characters are, at best, garbage. Leslie Mann’s character, who never wants children, changes her mind after approximately thirty seconds of holding a new born baby (she’s worked in a hospital for years, yet we’re supposed to believe this nonsensical U-turn) and seconds later, is pregnant via the help of a sperm donor.

At one point shortly after this, there appears, if I’m not mistaken, to be a joke about abortion; a subject matter that sparks a number of different emotions for most people- although one struggles to imagine how amusement is one of them.

The films’ putrescent attitude to its characters hampers the acting ability across the board; Johnson especially is a long way from her superb performance in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015) although it’s very hard to imagine fans of How To Be Single even being aware of that films’ existence (let alone that it’s a remake), and this proclamation perhaps leads to How To Be Single’s biggest insult- there are fans of this film; critically it didn’t do too badly on release. All film critique is subjective of course, the opinions on this film prove that beyond all doubt, but if How To Be Single portrays in any way whatsoever what single life is truly supposed to be like, this reviewer is doing it very wrongly indeed, and for that, I congratulate myself to the hilt.

The film closes with the line “The thing about being single is, you should cherish it. Because, in a week, or a lifetime, of being alone, you may only get one moment. One moment, when you're not tied up in a relationship with anyone.”

My response to this would be, if you’re single, spend two hours not watching How To Be Single, and trust me; it’s two hours you can cherish.

Repugnant. 0.4/10