Hollywood’s favourite habit of coincidentally releasing two films with the same premise near back to back has returned with Netflix’s A Family Affair. It’s a romcom about the single mother of a daughter, who falls in lust with a much younger, intimidatingly famous man. This is also exactly how you’d describe Prime Video’s recent, Anne Hathaway-fronted The Idea of You. Unfortunately, A Family Affair is the inferior of the two. It’s one of those Netflix productions that feels both under and overproduced, touting major stars (here, Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, and Joey King) while being shot and scored like an ad for a depression medication. Side effects may vary.
Kidman stars as widow and lapsed screenwriter Brooke Harwood, whose daughter Zara (King) is the harried assistant to actor Chris Cole (Efron), an amalgamation of the Hollywood Chrises (Evans, Hemsworth, Pine, Pratt). The magazines say he has “the world’s greatest abs”, he’s appeared on an episode of Hot Ones, and he’s currently stuck on the third instalment of a mortifyingly bad superhero franchise.
