Movie Review: A Family Affair

July 10, 2024

I am going to be honest, I knew next to nothing about this movie going into it. I was not expecting it to take place around Christmas (Christmas in July, I guess) and I didn’t expect it to be so much like The Idea of You.

So this movie takes place in LA and revolves around a young woman named Zara (Joey King). She is an assistant for Chris (Zac Efron) who is an a-list celebrity that cannot get out of being in crappy movie after crappy movie. Zara has been working for Chris for two years and, from the beginning, been his assistant was never really what she had signed up for. She decides that she is going to quit - that he has pushed her over the edge and she foist want to be involved in this anymore. But Chris needs her and goes over to her house to beg her to come back and work for him, but rather than finding Zara, he runs into her mom, Brooke (Nicole Kidman). He is pretty much instantly smitten and starts flirting with her.

No surprise, this is a story of betrayal, love, friendship, selfishness and finding ones-self. I think, had I seen this before I saw The Idea of You, I may have liked it more, but it honestly felt like the same story from a different point of view. We are really in a woman empowerment era, which I love and fully support, but I think we can come up with more story tropes than younger-man-falls-in-love-with-older-woman. Plus, Nicole Kidman looks ill the entire movie, and it is praised for it by Zara’s friend Genie, and I am not a fan of that. I think it is going to be rather triggering to some viewers.

I think it was cute and an easy girls night kind of movie, but I am not sure I would ever watch it again.