Alice And Steve (Disney+)
The title “Alice And Steve” doesn’t provide much insight into the story’s plot. All we know is that it involves a woman named Alice and a man named Steve.
Perhaps Disney could have taken a more daring approach with the title, something that better encapsulates the nature of its characters, like “Alice And Perve.”
Alice is a married mother of two who works in the children’s fashion industry. She also enjoys reminiscing about her wild days in the ’90s, indulging in heavy drinking and cocaine use.
Steve, on the other hand, is a 52-year-old wealthy, divorced celebrity hairstylist. He has been a close friend and former lover of Alice’s, watching her children grow up from a young age.
After attending a funeral and the subsequent boozy wake, Steve ends up spending the night at Alice’s house. In a surprising twist, he finds himself on the sofa in a compromising situation with Alice’s 26-year-old daughter, Izzy.
One night, after a funeral followed by a drunken wake, he stays over at her house and ends up having sex on the sofa with her 26-year-old daughter, Izzy.
That scene is so creepily flesh-crawling, I felt as though someone had emptied a sackful of beetles down my shirt.
But Disney treats this as a comedy.
When we first meet Alice and Perve (Nicola Walker and New Zealand actor Jemaine Clement), they’re standing over the open coffin of a dead friend. Perve has his French bulldog tucked under his arm.
Jemaine Clement takes on the role of Steve, a wealthy, divorced hair stylist to the stars
Nicola Walker as Alice, a married mother-of-two who works in children’s fashion and likes to relive her 1990s glory days
Jemaine Clement plays Steve and Nicola Walker plays Alice in Disney’s Alice and Steve
The animal sneezes, and the chums don’t know whether it’s good form to wipe dog splutter off the corpse’s face.
Later, in a bar, the dog scoffs their cocaine and almost dies. Isn’t that hilarious?
That night, Perve sees Izzy (the Israeli actress Yali Topol Margalith) sneaking downstairs for a 4am glass of wine, wearing nothing but a T-shirt.
Two minutes later, she’s snuggled up to him, telling him, ‘You’re weirdly hot’ and ‘You smell really nice’, before they start snogging. Next morning, he’s gone.
See what I mean about the sackful of creepy-crawlies?
In a scene that harks back to Love Actually (another romantic comedy that gives me the willies), Izzy turns up on Perve’s doorstep two days later. He hasn’t been answering her calls.
‘I know I shouldn’t have come here but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to stop thinking about you,’ she declares.
They fall into each other’s arms. Neither of them seems remotely bothered by the fact that he used to go on her family holidays when Izzy was a little girl.
When Mum finds out, she’s murderously angry, even though Izzy tells her, ‘He’s amazing at sex. I love having sex with him.’ Alice tries to sabotage them, by introducing Perve to a Gen Z crowd – but they all adore him too.
Walker does her best with the material. She’s played a similar role before, in BBC1’s Last Tango In Halifax, aghast when her elderly dad has a late-life affair with the sweetheart he loved and lost 60 years earlier.
But Last Tango, written by Sally Wainwright, was sensitive, witty and, though the romance was unconventional, never disturbing.
Alice And Perve has ‘disturbing’ written right the way through it. It’s a borderline paedo wish- fulfilment fantasy. Hideous.
