If her marriage were on a little better footing, she wouldn’t be fazed by any temptation, but her hubby Owen has been getting a lot of strange texts and keeping secrets of his own. Sure enough, as soon as she’s gone, he spies a starstruck journalism student (McNamara) in a bar who will provide him some of his own temptation.
It’s all about trust, as the title says, but it’s all based on an original play by Kristen Lazarian that was called “Push,” after a gambling term for a tie between a bettor and a bookie that also comes up in the film (which Lazarian cowrote with DeCubellis and K.S. Bruce).
It involves looking at the two sets of temptations a little closer by playing them again a couple of times with more context each time. This gives things a bit more of a twists from what we may have assumed had happened and deepen the light film a bit. But one does tire of all the replays (set up with that old device of rewinding action to get to the flashback).
Ronnie Chieng of “The Daily Show” and Lindsey Broad from “The Office” are seen briefly as a couple of married divorce attorneys who are also Brooke and Owen’s best friends, and every time they’re on the screen you kind of wish the film were about them.
But McNamara is also very good, shining through when the impasse of Brooke and Owen gets a little tiresome.
DeCubellis has made Manhattan-based noirs with glittering casts before. His first feature “Manhattan Night” in 2016 starred Adrien Brody, Yvonne Strahovski and Jennifer Beals. As in that one, he relies on existing locations, lending the film all the city’s verve with its pre-lockdown energy.
Because the couple’s chief problem is communication, there’s irony in the accurate use of texts, phone messages and map tracking that update old tropes of mistrust.
While it’s billed as a sexy tale, there’s very little sex involved, though the dialog gets salter than its actors were used to using on their network shows. And while it’s interesting to see theTV faces stretching a bit in grownup big screen roles, none of them go much father in range than we’ve seen them before.
“Trust” is available to stream on Hulu beginning today.