The Party Crasher

Kinsella (Love Your Life) delivers a fizzy account of an unmoored 20-something woman and her family’s drama. Effie Talbot’s father, Tony, split up with her beloved stepmother 18 months earlier. Tony has a new girlfriend, Krista Coleman, a much younger woman whom Effie doesn’t trust, which causes Effie’s relationship with her father to suffer. Meanwhile, her love life is in a shambles and she has been laid off, and to make matters worse, Krista and Tony have put Greenoaks, the family home in Nutworth, West Sussex, up for sale. Krista is planning a “house-cooling” party, and though Effie initially determines not to go, she changes her mind after she remembers that her cherished Russian dolls are in the house and she wants them back. The dolls become a sort of leitmotif for the various characters’ nested secrets: one revelation involves Effie’s ex, whom she runs into at the party and who reveals that despite a seemingly perfect veneer, he’s been dealing with clinical anxiety; another involves the state of Tony’s finances as revealed by Krista. By the time Effie retrieves her dolls, much has been uncovered and she is the wiser and happier for it. Humorous and lighthearted, this successfully commits to the notion that, given time, love will prevail. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Oct.)