Metacritic reviews

What Meadowland refuses to do, to its great credit, is conform to expectations.

Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.

It is tightly in sync with protagonists who find it impossible to move on despite distractions that might be catalytic in other films.

Chris Rossi built Meadowland’s screenplay on short, punchy scenes, and he deserves credit for crafting moments of quotidian ordinariness... that are also charged with tension.

The setup is a scriptwriting gimme — if your central couple lose a child, practically any subsequent behavior is justifiable — but the actors sell what they’re given quite effectively.

What saves Meadowland from being an exercise in masochism is the acting. Wilson and Wilde have a light touch that makes them perfect for the comedies they often make. Here, Morano leads them to much darker places, and they plunge right in.

Atmosphere and feelings can only do so much when story, and its credible beats, seem to have fallen by the wayside.

In the end, it feels like Morano didn’t trust her actors quite enough to be the conduits of emotion, falling back on too many filmmaking and screenwriting tropes that hamper the realism of their work.

The filmmakers take great pains not to stack the deck or overstate the couple's self-evident trauma, but watching the movie is ultimately like being one of their friends: You understand their pain on a conceptual level but can't feel it the way they do.

Though the film is well made, the all-aftermath approach to Meadowland leaves a lot — an establishing, enlightening character stability, for one thing — to be desired.