The film opens with a lively dinner party at a tastefully decorated West Elm thirst trap of a country mansion. The Architect is reminded of this dinner party by his Double, whom he encounters on a park bench in Argentina at a later date.
The Heroine is financially successful in a job that does not traditionally breed financial success—she’s a baker, or a playwright, or a playwriting baker, or a baking playwright. Somewhere between putting her croissants in the oven and Act I, Scene 5, she stares at the hole in her country mansion’s back yard—a hole that her debt-free, adult white children cannot fill—and decides to call an architect for whom every brick is the abyss of memory and every piece of mortar is a fragment of childhood.
The Architect is a guest at the dinner party. Years from now, on that park bench in Argentina, the Double will show the Architect a holiday napkin in which the Heroine wrapped a warm cookie, sending him home so that she could have sex with the hot, young doctor whose office is next to her bakery and who is played by that famous actor currently in between action roles.
The Architect returns with blueprints for the hole project. He lays them on the marble countertop where the Heroine had sex with the hot young doctor the night before (after which she called her financially successful, ambiguously employed white girlfriends, who you-go-girled her). “It’s divine!” she marvels, as the Architect continues unrolling the blueprints in an infinite scroll.
The Heroine goes to a local organic market where she expertly picks out just the right crab from the crab tank in a way that makes you want to Google “how to pick the best crab.” The market’s stereo system plays the most soulful Sam Cooke civil-rights anthem misused to score her crab struggle. In the checkout line, she sees him—the Architect, who tells her a story of languid boyhood summers in Argentina spent crab fishing. The story, it can be argued, is a chapter of “Moby Dick.”
The Heroine is given an ultimatum by Dr. Hot Young—join him on the set of his next action movie or continue to live in the country mansion overlooking her yard hole. The difficulty of this decision is compounded by a realization that her college-degree-holding-yet-somehow-debt-free adult white children have all tried to get with Dr. Hot Young in other movies and across alternate timelines, only to keep landing back at the same barbecue celebrating the eldest child’s engagement.
At the barbecue, as people dance and devour the Heroine’s homemade ice cream—a dessert that inspires you to buy Madagascar vanilla beans that you’ll never use—the half-marathon-running adult white children slip DMT into the punch that the Architect and Heroine consume before making out in the library (which others call the Universe), returning just in time for the Heroine to grab the last dance with Dr. Hot Young.
The Heroine, the Architect, the Doctor, the You-Go-Girl Posse, and the adult children run around the local gym, hiding behind medicine balls and weight racks in an attempt to avoid one another—only to end up in the same spin class. They interrupt the unnamed spin teacher—the only woman of color in the entire movie—with their shocking, cross-timeline revelations. For the teacher, spin class is the only thing that happens in her world, and for her this world will go on forever.
Years from now, on that bench in Argentina, the Double will relay to the Architect how the Heroine will always be the Heroine, the Architect will always be the Architect, and, despite the endless parade of assassins, Dr. Hot Young will never die.
The story is a rom-com but can also be interpreted as the reality of one man sitting in the corner, staring at a piece of mortar, under a West Elm lamp.
