“Eloise is our half sister, which means we can half ass the relationship,” we’re told in the trailer for Claire Scanlon’s “The People We Hate at the Wedding.” The Prime Video comedy stars “The Good Place” alumna Kristen Bell as Alice, who, along with her mother (Allison Janney, “Lou”) and brother Paul (Ben Platt. “Dear Evan Hansen”), voyages to England to attend the wedding of her well-to-do half-sister, Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, “The Rings of Power”). But the opportunity for the estranged family members to reconcile falls flat as tensions mount in the week leading up to the ceremony.
“The family’s many skeletons are wrenched from the closet, and the unlikely reunion gives everyone the motivation to move their own lives forward,” the film’s synopsis teases. “The People We Hate at the Wedding” promises to be a relatable wedding comedy “for anyone with a slightly dysfunctional family (everyone), or anyone who’s been forced to attend a wedding they tried to avoid (also everyone).”
“You know how at every wedding there are those people who everyone talks about after?” Janney’s character asks her children while they’re all detained in a holding cell. “We’re those people this time.”
Bell recently starred in “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window,” a Netflix series spoofing murder mysteries. Janney was last seen in Anna Foerster’s “Lou,” an action pic which sees the Oscar-winning “I, Tonya” actress helping a desperate mother (Jurnee Smollett, “Birds of Prey”) find her kidnapped daughter.
A veteran in the comedy genre, Scanlon won an Emmy in 2013 for her editing work on “The Office.” “The People We Hate at the Wedding” follows her 2020 film sequel to “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Kimmy vs the Reverend,” an interactive story that follows the cult survivor played by Ellie Kemper.
Written by siblings Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin and Wendy Molyneux, both known for their work on “Bob’s Burgers,” “The People We Hate at the Wedding” launches on Prime Video November 18.
