You Hurt My Feelings film review — director Nicole Holfocener zooms in on neurotic Manhattanites

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Writer-director Nicole Holofcener has been a mainstay of the US independent circuit since 1996’s Walking and Talking, and a longtime specialist in sophisticated female-centred comedies. Her latest film You Hurt My Feelings is about pampered, neurotic Manhattanites whose personal traumas seem inconsequential given the griefs of the wider world — but they know it, and that’s part of the joke.

The star is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, from Seinfeld, Veep and Holofcener’s 2013 film Enough Said, a very grown-up romcom that cast her counter-intuitively but brilliantly against the late James Gandolfini. Here Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a writer struggling with her novel, following an only vaguely successful memoir that none of her writing students have read. Her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is a psychotherapist, going through a period of weary self-doubt and contending with patients who include an obstreperous couple (David Cross and Amber Tamblyn, priceless together) who seem addicted to attritional carping.

Don has always been supportive, but when Beth overhears him confessing that he’s not mad about the novel, her world collapses. And, because anxiety is contagious, so do the worlds of her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) and Sarah’s actor husband (Arian Moayed). A delicious tangle of comic paradox, the film explores the idea that in being enthusiastically affirmative of your loved ones, you may unknowingly cause them hurt and damage.

The film is super-spare in execution, yet everything is meticulously tuned. The acting is superb too: as Beth, tenderly agonised, smiling doggedly through the daily humiliations, Louis-Dreyfus creates a lovely lived-in rapport with Menzies, who proves a master of the contained, near-subliminal cringe, his lined face looking as if it’s about to slide very, very slowly off his head. And Jeannie Berlin, recently the family doyenne in The Fabelmans, is imperiously tetchy as Beth’s mother. As an urbane, angst-fuelled New York comedy, it undoubtedly occupies familiar territory; it’s edited by Woody Allen’s long-term collaborator Alisa Lepselter. But Holofcener’s film is sharper than anything Allen has done for decades, and with a wry voice that’s purely her own.

★★★★☆

On Amazon Prime Video now