“Adult Life Skills” is finally hitting theaters stateside. The British comedy is being released by Screen Media in theaters and On Demand in the U.S. January 18, 2019. Written and directed by Rachel Tunnard, the pic sees “Doctor Who” star Jodie Whittaker playing a decidedly less accomplished character.
Anna (Whittaker) isn’t traveling through time and space to save civilization — she’s living in her mom’s garden shed. Satisfied with her accommodations and spending all her time making funny videos, she begins to reevaluate her life as she approaches 30. She’s starting to feel the pressure “to move on and ‘grow up’ without compromising her youthful spirit,” the plot’s official synopsis details.
“It’s a story about being lost and finding yourself, making peace with who you are and regaining self-confidence and dignity,” Tunnard told us. “I wrote it because I was working as a film editor and reading a lot of scripts and watching a lot of films, yet I wasn’t really finding many that felt authentic to me — ones that chimed with my friendships, my relationships, and my experience of the world. It felt like the emphasis in the industry on generating more ‘strong female stories’ meant that there were lots of scripts about women floating around, but none of the British ones felt true to me,” she explained. “I think that life is brilliant and a tragedy and this contradiction is at the center of what I wanted to write — a story that is funny but serious; artful but true; ugly but beautiful. A celebration in the face of something awful. I also wanted my characters to embody those contradictions too — because people are messy, right? And we are not always strong. Things happen; we make mistakes; we need other people.”
“Adult Life Skills” is based on Tunnard’s 2014 short “Emotional Fusebox.” The feature premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, where Tunnard won the Nora Ephron prize. She also won the 2016 British Independent Film Award for Best Debut Screenwriter.