‘The Threesome’ Is a Rom-Com, But It’s Also Kind of a Horror Movie About Not Being on Birth Control

What I described, of course, is just Olivia’s vantage point. But Connor and Jenny’s experiences of this misshapen, malformed almost-love-triangle are pretty terrifying too. Shortly after the threesome, Connor’s dreams come true as he and Olivia fall in love, decide to keep their unplanned pregnancy, and start imagining their family and life together—only for Jenny to show up a little over a month after their hookup to share some news of her own. 

If you haven’t figured it out yet, The Threesome centers around dual pregnancies and all the tensions and head-spinning scenarios they create. Consequently, it also weaves in tough, interesting conversations about sexual and reproductive health. At the heart of several of the movie’s biggest, most tension-laden twists and reveals are confusion about condom use and dishonest claims about birth control and vasectomies. Neither of these pregnancies are planned, and the characters’ paths to deciding to keep them are… interesting to say the least. 

One of the characters comes very, very close to having an abortion. I generally dislike the storytelling trope of someone almost having an abortion only to have a change of heart—which typically stems from some stigmatizing appeal to their conscience. But that’s not what happens here. Olivia and Jenny’s decisions to move forward are puzzling but organic. Refreshingly, the characters say the word “abortion,” a word many movies and politicians shy away from—and the film offers accurate information about in-clinic and medication abortions and the differences between the two. It also briefly highlights the severe strain of what one of the characters calls “our country’s fucked up abortion laws,” as the abortion clinic closest to Little Rock, Arkansas, is about 300 miles away in Illinois. 

I respect everyone’s reproductive choices throughout the movie, even though, boy, do I disagree with some of them! But the conversations about said choices are all pretty thought-provoking, pushing the boundaries of The Threesome‘s rom-com status. “Does this make me a Republican?” one of the characters asks when she ultimately decides not to have an abortion. It’s almost a throwaway line, given the movie’s steady churn of intricately executed chaos and zingers. But to me, the line reads as a hard-hitting reminder that what we want and choose for ourselves may not always, on the surface, fit 1:1 with our politics. Also, I can’t stress enough that making a personal choice isn’t an indicator of what rights you think others should or shouldn’t have.

As for the character who knows from the start that she wants to keep her unplanned pregnancy, even under some extremely unideal circumstances, she plays a brief, little prank on Connor, pretending to be religious and asking him to pray with her. The prank plays with Connor’s assumption that she’s Christian, because, he assumes, otherwise she’d simply have an abortion. There’s a message here: People have or don’t have abortions for a wide range of reasons—religious and non-religious.

The Threesome largely unfolds as a series of accidents, in which frustrations and emotions run high, all while no one is really at fault for anything. The movie is a comedy of errors buoyed by Young-White’s scene-stealing charm as Connor’s best friend, and it’s impressive how skillfully it avoids the predictable. For example, as one Q&A audience member raised, the movie isn’t about a love triangle, or two women competing for a man, or a man torn between two love interests. There are some tensions, and there’s some jealousy, but none of it is a focal point, and it’s simply impossible that a situation like this, involving all the hormones of pregnancy, would be tension-free. “I don’t like the idea that it’s a movie where they would be enemies or, like, competing over Connor,” writer Ethan Ogilby said. “And honestly, some of my favorite moments in the film are the moments between the two of them [Olivia and Jenny].”

The (early) consensus about this movie, as it still seeks a U.S. distributor, is that it’s the heartfelt story of three messy, young-ish adults, sincerely trying their best but inadvertently and repeatedly hurting each other along the way. In that sense, for all its wholly unbelievable sequences and absurdity, it’s actually quite, quite real.