Like many of his more personal movies to date, it’s an odd phenomenon that Jake Johnson has continued to fly so far under the radar in Hollywood. That’s not to say he hasn’t had a run of good fortune in a successful television series (New Girl, running from 2011-2018) or found his way into a booming blockbuster franchise with 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its 2023 sequel. We’ll skip discussing his skimpy sidekick role in Tom Cruise’s ill-advised reboot of The Mummy back in 2017 (where I thought Johnson was more suitable for the lead than Cruise) and land in the last decade where the actor has explored work behind the camera. Co-writing smaller features (2021’s Ride the Eagle is a gem), he’s graduated to a solo outing writing and directing a new film for Hulu, Self Reliance.

Produced by the gang from The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) but somewhat surprisingly hands-off, Self Reliance may be getting a promotional bump by using the comedy trio for name recognition, but audiences expecting the same brand of instant gratification humor won’t find it here.  Instead, Johnson is playing the long game, creating a meta-world where he plays Tommy Walcott, a bored Los Angeles guy in his early forties living at home with his mom (Nancy Lenehan, Night Swim) after ending a twenty-year relationship with Theresa (Natalie Morales, No Hard Feelings). His life is on autopilot, and when a limo carrying Samberg (Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers) pulls up next to him and asks him to hop in, he does so mainly to break up the monotony.

Samberg deposits Tommy at a warehouse where producers of a game show on the dark web offer 1 million dollars if he can survive the next thirty days without dying. If he agrees, cameras will follow his every move, and he will be an open target for anyone to murder him and collect the money themselves. The only way to stave off the hunters is to be always in the presence of other people, 24/7. If he is never alone for those thirty days, he is untouchable. Sounds easy, right? Tommy thinks so, and with that loophole identified, he agrees, and the game is on.

Put into practice, staying around someone every moment of every day is more challenging than it appears to be. What happens when a bathroom break is needed? A well-trained sniper could be waiting blocks away to pick Tommy off. If Tommy is sharing a bed with someone who gets up for a late-night snack, a sneaky intruder can make their move the moment the refrigerator door opens. Then there’s the added wrinkle that no one in his family, especially dubious sisters Mary Holland (Happiest Season) and Emily Hampshire (Appendage), believes Tommy is on a game show. They think he’s gone off the deep end, and his anxious actions don’t do much to dissuade them and, eventually, us. The further we get into the film and the more the curtains appear to be pulled back, it seems like Tommy has conjured up the whole premise…even though we’ve seen the producers offer him the shot at the money.

It’s always a crapshoot when an actor moves behind the camera. The odds double when they direct themselves, and I’m not sure even Vegas will take the odds on projects where a star director is also the credited writer. They can either turn out as revolutionary Oscar winners along the lines of 1997’s Life is Beautiful or go down as vanity bombs like the Angelina Jolie fiasco By the Sea in 2015. Johnson’s debut is neither an embarrassment nor is it as satisfying as I had hoped it would be. It exists somewhere in that murky middle area of cinema where it can be hard to predict who the precise audience that will respond to the material most is. Responsive to where Self Reliance takes you or not, you can’t deny that the movie has an aura of confidence surrounding it from the start, making its first 2/3 an enticing mystery you hope is leading to a resolution as strong as its setup.

It would be wrong of me to reveal too much more about where the last act of Self Reliance goes or the extent to which Anna Kendrick’s character Maddy (Anna Kendrick (Alice, Darling) has on Tommy’s placement in the game. Their awkward romance coincides with the goal of making it to the end of the thirty days, but is one motivated by something other than survival? Kendrick arrives when Johnson’s script starts to fray, even as his direction and performance grows stronger. Like all mysteries, the more we learn of the solution, the less magical it all becomes in hindsight, but I must give Johnson credit for drawing things out for as long as he does without hinting at where Self Reliance might be headed.

Even as the film gets progressively weirder, Johnson’s casting of a dependable troupe of talent keeps you on your toes. Holland continues to impress as a reliable comedic force, and she makes up for the cool aloofness I felt from Hampshire, who fades a bit into the background. I got a kick out of Daryl J. Johnson as Holland’s husband, who spends an amazingly awkward night in Tommy’s company, and character actress Lenehan has bite playing Tommy’s exhausted mom. Speaking of character actors, the enormously charming Biff Whiff has appeared in countless television shows since the ‘80s and gets a plum role here as a homeless man whom Tommy hires as his constant companion.

Ultimately, Self Reliance finds its way to an end that defies our expectations to a fault. It’s as if Johnson’s gut knew where the audience wanted the film to go and how the answer key should line up, but rather than pick the obvious route, he went for an even more conventional choice, weakening what could have been a more substantial debut.