Some other critics have taken issue with the tempo, slapping Conversations With Friends with three star write-ups. There’s also a small part for Young Offenders’ Alex Murphy, as France’s deadpan colleague at her summer job (maybe it’s because they’re both from Cork but Oliver and Murphy are the only two actors sharing any genuine chemistry).Īll of this unfolds in a cloud of elevated languor: in the Rooneyerse nobody can hear you scream, because why scream when you can sob quietly to yourself on the Dart?

Joe Alwyn and Alison Oliver as Nick and Frances in Conversations with Friends. Frances travels to visit her parents outside the city for a catch-up with her passive-aggressive mother (Justine Mitchell) and her sad-sack dad (Tiernan, on the couch, eating a micro-wave dinner). Rooney's novel asks us to spend a great deal of time inside Frances's head, and Alison Oliver impressively communicates the character's hyper-introversion: the sense of a placid exterior containing gravity wells of emotion. A slower dance ensues between Frances and Nick. Her husband, Nick, is an actor – possibly Irish, though it’s hard to tell because Alwyn’s accent fell overboard on the ferry from Holyhead and is presently bobbing up and down wondering when the rescue party shows up.īobbi and Melissa are soon flirting like pros. She’s from London, so everyone remarks on how incredible it is that she would want to live in Dublin (Bobbi, from New York, agrees).

One night – at one of those poetry readings – they cross paths with a trendy and clearly very toxic married couple, Melissa (Jemima Kirk) and Nick (Joe Alwyn). Friends since forever, they spend their time hanging around Trinity or delivering annoying spoken-word poetry in a bar that looks like the Workman’s Club but can’t be (interior scenes were shot in Belfast). Here, with country-pop indie star CMAT warbling with gusto on the soundtrack, we are introduced to arty undergrads Frances (newcomer Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane).

Conversation with friends book review