Some films just miss the mark. Fine, okay, it happens. Then there’s I Don’t Understand You, a “horror-comedy” that doesn’t so much miss the mark as hurl itself into a ditch and furiously starts to dig itself into a deeper hole. I dunno, to me there’s something especially insidious about a movie that masks bigotry with whimsy, and though it styles itself with travelogue flair laced with adoption-themed sentimentality, it’s an offensively miscalculated slog through rural Italy. The premise sounds like a queer twist on Weekend at Bernie’s or a self-aware take on Americans behaving badly abroad, but its execution reveals a queasy blend of tone-deaf humor and lazy stereotypes. Worse yet, it’s produced by Amanda Knox, yes, that Amanda Knox, which feels less like meta-irony and more like bad taste turned up to eleven.

Dom (Nick Kroll, Sausage Party) and Cole (Andrew Rannells, The Boys in the Band) are a well-off gay couple from Los Angeles celebrating their tenth anniversary with a trip to Italy. Gunshy after being scammed in their previous attempt at adoption, shortly after arriving they receive a small glimmer of hope after video conferencing with a pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried, You Should Have Left) who is strongly considering them to adopt her baby. Their romantic getaway takes a dark turn after they visit Daniele (Paolo Romano), an old friend of Dom’s father. He’s arranged for an anniversary dinner at a farm restaurant in the provincial town of Orvieto near Umbria that’s been mysteriously closed for months. Poor directions, a detour, a rental car stuck in mud, and a heavy rainstorm leave them stranded in rural nowhere.

Saved by a grumpy farmer only to be scared by his shotgun, the couple (neither of whom speaks Italian) finally reach their destination and find themselves warmly welcomed by restaurant owner Zia Luciana (Nunzia Schiano). However, the celebratory evening spirals into disaster when they mistake her thick Italian accent and grand physical gestures for homophobic slurs. Reacting with almost cartoonish outrage at the cultural misunderstandings, one minute, the couple is side-eyeing suspicious pizza topped with horse sausage (or rather, vegetarian Cole is gagging it down), the next, a series of accidental deaths unfold with nauseating predictability. The men begin to leave a trail of bodies in their wake while desperately trying to cover up their mounting mistakes because, wouldn’t you know it, Candace calls with the news that she’s chosen them to be the fathers and she is going into labor.

I get the joke here and understand that it’s meant to be a farce. However, what it plays as is a miserable homophobic parody. Dom and Cole are two characters (caricatures are more like it) defined not by their love for one another or humanity in general but by tired, overused tropes of snarky entitlement and dumbbell ineptitude. Confusing cruelty with comedy and ignorance for innocence, this becomes a queer-coded Very Bad Things, with none of the bite of that not-so-great movie and all of its bile. The film attempts some gentle mockery of Americans feeling so secure in their privilege that they can walk away from any chaos unscathed, even when that chaos involves multiple deaths. One semi-running gag has Dom and Cole rationalizing their horrific actions due to perceived slurs in a language they don’t understand while far more harmful situations unfold around them.

Kroll does what he can to salvage something human out of Dom and make him vaguely likable, but the character is written as little more than a people-pleaser chasing approval. Rannells fares far worse, burdened with a character so callous and clueless you start to wonder if the filmmakers even like gay people, or anyone, really. Their dynamic is meant to be opposites-attract, but the two have zero chemistry, which is particularly odd for a movie allegedly inspired by the real-life parenthood journey of its gay co-directors, David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano. There’s an unspoken bitterness lurking beneath the entirety of I Don’t Understand You, as if someone’s found a way of venting a very specific grudge and is now trying to sell it as comedy.

Brief flashes of intrigue emerge when Morgan Spector (Nanny) shows up as Zia Luciana’s son, and I thought that we were about to get an injection of actual tension into the increasingly frenetic plot. But even that fizzles as quickly as it arrives, doing Spector (and the viewer) quite dirty. Seyfried, meanwhile, has a glorified cameo and likely filmed her scenes in a single weekend—a favor to the filmmakers that’s unfortunately wasted.

Italy is one of the most cinematic places on Earth, and even though most of the film takes place after the sun has set, what we can see in the daylight looks flat, dull, and oddly lifeless. There’s a strange, uninspired fog hanging over the cinematography like the movie can’t decide whether it wants to be a glossy romantic getaway or a grim tale of accidental homicide. Spoiler: it fails spectacularly at both. The editing feels choppy and uncertain, much like the directors’ grasp on their own story’s tone and purpose.

The most unsettling aspect isn’t the violence (which is mostly offscreen) or the thematic mess (which is glaring), but the utter lack of perspective. I Don’t Understand You isn’t a movie that challenges anything but it is one determined to avoid everything, especially its most interesting idea: what happens when two well-meaning but oblivious people try to become parents? These men don’t seem emotionally ready for a baby; they can barely take care of themselves. That could’ve worked if the film had the guts to examine their flaws. It never questions its characters’ right to parent, nor does it seriously engage with the politics of gay adoption. Given the increasingly hostile climate toward LGBTQ+ families globally, the optics of two privileged white American men literally killing their way to fatherhood are beyond questionable—it’s damaging. As a gay man, I found myself actively rooting for them to be caught or denied a baby by the finale.

Throughout the film, I kept being reminded of those backward-facing comedies from the early 2000s that we wince at now, except here we are in 2025, and you can’t believe any filmmaker, especially an LGBTQ+ one, would contribute to the creation of such a relic of a crueler era. To be clear, I have a high tolerance for messy comedy. I’ve laughed at things I probably shouldn’t have. (I even laughed at one abominable one in this film due to its accompanying visual.)

But I Don’t Understand You doesn’t push boundaries; it retreats into outdated stereotypes that give ammunition to every regressive talking point currently making headlines. It’s smug without being smart, and having Knox as a consulting producer feels particularly problematic, given the storyline of Americans getting away with murder in Italy, which speaks to the movie’s overall questionable taste level.

A flavorless exercise in empty provocation that doesn’t even have the decency to be funny, the insipidly stupid I Don’t Understand You represents everything wrong with contemporary comedy’s approach to sensitive subjects.