In middle school, your best friend is your lifeline during some of the worst, most turbulent times in your life. To have someone outside your family who understands you is a gift. Over time, these friendships can fade because of time, distance, or both, but a select few endure into adulthood. No matter how long they last, nearly all friendships reach a breaking point of sorts. It’s this precipice that is the center of Adult Best Friends. Two best friends are at a place in their lives where they have to decide if the future will allow them to hold space for each other, or if their best moments are only in the past.

For decades, Katie (Katie Corwin) and Delaney (Delaney Buffett) have been inseparable. They met in middle school in the bathroom of a kissing party, one ready for their first kiss and the other hiding until her mom came to pick her up. In a turn of events, they decide to leave together and have the first of many sleepovers. In the present, Katie and Delaney are on wildly different pages. Katie is living with her boyfriend, John (Mason Gooding), while Delaney bounces around to parties, has 2:00 a.m. hook-ups, and complains about the world with her roommate (Cazzie David). John proposes, and while Katie enthusiastically says yes, she’s worried about how this will strain her friendship with Delaney. To soften the blow, Katie plans a beach getaway for Delaney, but things quickly spiral out of control.

If the names of the characters wasn’t a dead giveaway, Corwin and Buffet share a co-writing credit on the film, with Buffet also in the director’s chair. They based Adult Best Friends on their own decades-long friendship and wrote exaggerated versions of themselves to process their growing and changing personal dynamic. The only friendships that last are the ones that understand people must change. Relationships of any kind are both difficult and effortless. Difficult in the sense that change of any kind is hard, but effortless in that if two people earnestly want to work on their relationship, they can create something that endures. Not every friendship is made to last, and choosing to walk away from one may at times be the best choice for everyone, even if it’s the decision that hurts the most. That’s the precipice we find Katie and Delaney on. Their paths have diverged irrevocably and it will take a conscious commitment on both of their parts to stay in each others’ lives, but do they want to put in the time?

Adult Best Friends may not have worked on the level it does were it not for Corwin and Buffet. From the first scene, where the audience sees the characters as adults, it’s clear that there’s a lived-in history between them. It’s a hard-earned chemistry that cannot be replicated, and it adds great depth to the friendship at the center of the film. The rest of the cast is equally compelling, with Gooding as the standout he usually is. It’s usually very easy to hate your best friend’s boyfriend, but nearly impossible to do it when he has Gooding’s charm. It wouldn’t be a buddy comedy without an oddball supporting cast like the overbearing boss (Casey Wilson), the wild beach stranger (Benjamin Norris), and the obnoxious Airbnb host (Cory Walls).

Platonic relationships aren’t often given the in-depth treatment romantic ones get. Adult Best Friends joins the likes of Frances Ha, Booksmart, and Life Partners as an endearing ode to the complicated evolution of friendships over time. It’s immensely hard to grow apart from the person who was a constant for so much of your life, but Adult Best Friends finds the humor and possibility in this change. It's both a gift and a curse to look at someone and still feel twelve years old. To be simultaneously trapped in an age you no longer are and have someone in the present who has spent years loving you. Adult Best Friends is an encouragement to grow, to change, and to push the ones you love to do the same.

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“Adult Best Friends” - Film Review

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