‘Alone Together’ Review: Katie Holmes’ COVID Drama Should Have Stayed in Quarantine

variety.com:

Michael Nordine authorWho’s going to make the first truly great COVID movie? A number of filmmakers have thrown their hats in the ring since the pandemic began in earnest two and a half years ago, but so far the documentaries have outpaced every drama not named “Kimi.” Katie Holmes’ sophomore directorial effort does little to change that.“Alone Together” — which Holmes also wrote, produced and stars in — takes place in the early days of lockdown, when uncertainty was rising as rapidly as case counts.

Holmes stars as June, a New York food critic who flees the city thinking that her boyfriend (Derek Luke) will be joining her Upstate; when his family situation prevents that, she and another man (Jim Sturgess) find themselves alone … together.

A double-booking error forces the two of them to stay in the same AirBnB a few hours outside the city, with what happens next sure to surprise anyone who’s never seen a movie before.

But the film’s low-key charms, such as they are, aren’t restrained by adherence to formula so much as its myopic worldview. Focusing an early-pandemic drama on two people who can afford to quarantine far away from the hoi polloi is a choice, as the kids say, as is the bizarrely casual reveal that one of the principals lost their parents in a murder-suicide; there’s also a strange amount of product placement, with a certain fast-food chain and canned-spaghetti empire getting more screentime than you’re probably expecting.Suffice to say that all this distracts from what’s meant to be a conversation-heavy romance about the importance of human connection at a time when so many of us were physically distanced from our loved ones (hence the title).