Metacritic reviews

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.

There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

With all this at play, Matt and Mara conjures a very particular kind of magic: that of an emotional journey which is shared but never properly enunciated.

The film offers no easy answer for their situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden.

Campbell and Johnson – both of whom worked with Radwanski in Anne at 13,000 ft. - make a great team. They've been allowed to improvise some of their dialogue, which adds to a sense that we’re eavesdropping on two people who are responding to a particular moment.

Matt and Mara is one of those films in which very little concrete happens, but the tingling possibility that something might makes it compelling.

The naturalistic camerawork and performances ground the film in realism, creating a wry dramedy that refuses to placate us with easy answers or condescension.

Radwanski uses restless, handheld cameras and improvisation to capture micro-moments in which not a lot happens but the implications are huge.

Matt and Mara is less a movie than an idea for one. It doesn’t help that neither character is likable, or that the director and writer, Kazik Radwanski, fills the screen with close-ups in lieu of information.

Here is a toothless, aimless dramedy from Canada, a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.