That’s “unimaginable” within the sense of “too ludicrous to be believed,” not within the awestruck that means of the phrase. “The Good Mom” begins depressingly life like, as Marissa wakes up one morning on her sofa with a half-empty bottle on the espresso desk in entrance of her. Hungover and scowling—her default setting, because it seems—she drags herself into work, the place her son Toby (Jack Reynor) interrupts a workers assembly to convey Marissa some horrible information: Her different son, Michael, is lifeless.
It’s been months since Marissa final spoke to Michael, who alienated his household within the leadup to his dying by the use of his worsening heroin habit. It wasn’t the medication that killed him, however a bullet from an unknown killer in a late-night drive-by capturing. Toby suspects Michael’s greatest good friend, Ducky (Hopper Penn), with whom Michael was concerned in shady dealings, pulled the set off. However Marissa intuits that there’s extra occurring right here than a soured friendship and a drug deal gone awry.
So does Paige (Olivia Cooke), Michael’s girlfriend, who’s now pregnant and alone—apart from Marissa, who begrudgingly accepts Paige’s presence in her life after decking her within the jaw on the funeral. The tentative relationship between Marissa and Paige, neither of whom notably like one another however are bonded by their love for Michael, is the movie’s most engrossing side. It’s extra fascinating than their joint investigation into Michael’s dying, which sputters and spins earlier than shedding its momentum fully. By the point we discover out what actually occurred to him, “The Good Mom” has already moved on.
This occurs about an hour in, with the primary of a number of plot developments that set “The Good Mom” on a tawdry new path to an unsatisfying ending. It might be gauche to disclose them right here, in fact, however they take the story from convincingly bleak to clichéd and ridiculous. These twists are laid atop the realistically textured setting that director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte works so arduous to ascertain within the movie’s first two-thirds, invalidating it. Why hassle capturing drone footage of sooty freeway overpasses and hiring Larry Fessenden to play a grief counselor when you’re going to desert actuality halfway via?