After years of all of us thinking the romantic comedy was dead, it seems a new generation of filmmakers has finally risen up to reinvent that heartwarming genre. In between Netflix’s recent slate of rom-coms and the splashy arrival of Crazy Rich Asians, we may be entering a new age of a once-derided brand of comedy. Enter Cat Rhinehart’s Brand New Old Love. The indie film has all the trappings of a classic will-they-or-won’t-they? plot. When Charlie (Broad City and Narcos’ Arturo Castro) returns to Modesto to visit family, he runs into his high school bff Hannah (Aya Cash), the girl he’d promised to marry if neither of them had tied the knot by the time they were 30. A drunken night later, that’s exactly what they do only to realize that may not have been the smartest idea.
Part Friends-season five finale plot and part millennial disenchantment comedy, Brand New Old Love will force these two former friends into making a ramshackle of a marriage work. Sure, it turns out Charlie shares his studio apartment with a roommate, and they all share a giant bed made up of joined mattresses. And maybe their Garden State-like drunken escapade was all a way of masking the disappointment in the lives they’re currently living — he never did become a famous rock star, she’s just getting over a divorce. But they hope there’s a way to rekindle the mix-tape-making friendship that first bonded them together.
And then, of course, they’ll try to figure out whether a strong friendship is enough to make a marriage work. “What did you expect was gonna happen,” Charlie asks Hannah in the recently released trailer for the film as they realize that maybe things aren’t happily-ever-aftering on their own, “we were just gonna make out in the rain all day, listen to some Damien Rice?” “Yeah, kind of, didn’t you?” He sighs before admitting he did as well, actually.
So if you want to see Castro go full rom-com leading man, check out the trailer below.
Brand New Old Love hits Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, and YouTube on August 28, 2018.