Is there a subgeneric name for that type of black comedy about someone with zero personal boundaries who can only be repelled through abject cruelty (if at all)? Movies like WHAT ABOUT BOB? and THE CABLE GUY may come to mind, but Mike Leigh’s GROWN-UPS is way more intense than either of those. I might also appreciate it more because in the standard version of this kind of narrative, the interloper is portrayed as intrusive yet basically sort of innocent, whereas the person defending themselves and their territory is shown to be curmudgeonly and uptight, and deserving of a hard lesson about love or something. This is totally maddening to me as someone who needs a lot of personal space, who doesn’t like to be touched, and who enjoys her own company. People who like a lot of contact just can’t imagine this, and often when I tell someone not to hug me, they insist on it anyway like they’re doing me a big favor, as if I just don’t know what’s good for me or I’m too shy to ask for what I truly want (which is for someone to mash their body all over me while grunting and sighing obviously). Anyway, GROWN-UPS is a movie that makes a hilarious and terrifying ordeal out of the need to defend your own boundaries, without insinuating that you should just give in and let people do whatever they hell they want to you because cherishing your own privacy is somehow the same as rejecting other people.
I got a similar charge out of THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, although that movie is a little more ambiguous on the subject. But don’t even get me started on movies like THE STATION AGENT, where someone who is perfectly happy in their solitude has their privacy violated over and over again until they’re bullied into submission by extroverts who think everyone should be just like them. Shiver.
