Every so often, a film comes along that is genuinely mystifying. I don’t mean in the sense that it is arrestingly cryptic or so surprising as to linger long in the mind, but that one is perplexing because of the choices the director and screenwriters made. 

In the Hollywood Hills, a woman makes a tense phone call to report an act of domestic abuse. We soon discover that this crime has not yet occurred, for she soon confesses to her husband at dinner that she received an invitation for an anonymous sexual encounter a while back. She followed up and had a great time, and announces to him that the success of this rendezvous exposed fissures in their relationship for her. In short, she wants out. Her husband then proceeds to brutalize her. 

Cut to Jordan (Jim Cummings, who writes and directs with co-star PJ McCabe), a hotshot at a powerhouse talent agency, who promptly receives an invitation in the mail like the one described by the woman in the opening sequence. We see his face close up, and he’s almost comically confused and frightened. His fiancée, Caroline (Virginia Newcomb), is in the background, asking questions about their upcoming wedding. She seems kind, earnest, yet we cannot mistake Jordan’s irrepressible interest. His pursuit and the aftermath of this anonymous hookup forms the bulk of the plot, and is tied together with various Hollywood machinations involving overseas and packaging deals, all of which take Jordan somewhat out of his depth. 

So, mystifying? First of all, the audience doesn’t learn quite enough about Jordan to justify his sudden interest in this invitation. I asked myself many times what exactly was so wrong with his relationship with Caroline. She’s kind, straightforward, classically beautiful—what is wrong? We never get a satisfactory answer, other than a not-so-subtle indication that “boys will be boys.” Caroline and her many charms set aside, Jordan is so instantly trusting of a letter that could so clearly be a scam or a trap, and the film does not do much to make that believable.  

Equally puzzling is Cummings’s acting. Watching this film, I often felt like I was observing an actor uncomfortable in his role rather than a person uncomfortable in his skin. His face twitches, his delivery is unfocused. The lack of conviction extends to the writing of the character. The socially awkward Jordan is unconvincing as a Hollywood player, who happens to know little about how Big Tech uses metadata. His attempts to flatter, cajole, and threaten are so transparent, his social skills so nonexistent, that it is hard to conceive of him as the Hollywood Big Shot the film makes him out to be. 

Then there is the satirical aspect which is stuffed in as inelegantly as a turkey in a mailbox. The strokes here are very broad. They involve film executives making every conceivable mistake under the sun while espousing capitalistic ideals that would destroy independent filmmaking. This part lives uneasily side by side with Jordan’s travails, and even if they were plaited more convincingly together, it is too ham-fisted to carry any real bite. 

As a result, the film suffers from the excesses of these two flaws: the lack of believability and the broadness of its strokes.