Film

Fay Grim

Fay Grim is a deranged spy thriller disguised as a family comedy. Parker Posey careens through an increasingly baroque plot involving her missing husband's mysterious journals, CIA agents, and revelations that upend everything. It's willfully strange, aggressively uninterested in making sense, and absolutely committed to its own chaos. Made for people who find conventional storytelling boring.

TMDb rating2.8

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you loved the deadpan, verbal, slightly unhinged wit of Hal Hartley's Henry Fool and want its sequel's espionage tangled up with family absurdity and wordplay.

Skip it if you want a tight, propulsive spy thriller; this one meanders through its globe-trotting plot and leans on talky, self-aware comedy more than on suspense.

What it asks of you: It runs just under two hours and rewards patience, with a deliberately odd rhythm, dry line readings, and a plot that keeps doubling back on itself as you try to keep track.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Henry Fool1998

The first film in this odd two-part saga—essential context that deepens Fay Grim's lunacy. A strange, blackly comic portrait of a charlatan poet and the family he destabilizes. Rewarding in ways that will make Fay Grim click into place.

But It moves slowly and spends a lot of time on conversation and character dynamics rather than plot momentum. Some will find that meditative, others will find it slack.

Henry Fool poster

The Hudsucker Proxy1994

The Coen Brothers at their most visually inventive and fun, with a similar tone of heightened screwball absurdity. Tim Robbins as a naive factory heir navigates corporate chaos with pratfalls and genuine wit. Pure pleasure.

But The constant, relentless energy and density of jokes can exhaust you. And the '50s-pastiche production design might feel affected rather than charming.

The Hudsucker Proxy poster

Burn After Reading2008

Released the same year, another film that treats espionage as an engine for farcical confusion. Clooney and Pitt stumble through a plot that keeps expanding in absurd directions. Chaos and comedy in perfect balance.

But It's deliberately plotless—the jokes come from watching competent people fail at basic tasks. If you need a story with stakes, this will feel hollow.

Burn After Reading poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Fay Grim

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen1988

Both are maximalist films that treat plot logic as disposable—stories where the telling matters more than the truth, and style becomes the substance.

Terry Gilliam's gorgeously absurd fantasy about a man telling increasingly impossible stories. Like Fay Grim, it's obsessed with narrative unreliability and the gap between what's true and what's told. Both films prioritize visual chaos and character obsession over plot coherence.

But It's visually exhausting and emotionally thin. The constant spectacle can feel hollow, and the story collapses under its own ambition.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen poster
More like this (7)

Mulholland Drive2001

David Lynch's masterpiece about identity, Los Angeles, and the stories we tell ourselves. It shares Fay Grim's willingness to abandon conventional logic for something stranger. Visually stunning and psychologically destabilizing.

But It's nearly three hours and refuses to explain itself. Many people find it infuriating rather than illuminating. You have to be okay with ambiguity as an ending.

Mulholland Drive poster

Moonlight Mile2002

Brad Silberling's film about grief and obsession, where a man becomes entangled in the lives of his girlfriend's parents after her death. Quietly devastating, with an absurdist edge and a cast at their most human.

But It's somber and digressive. There's not much happening plot-wise, and the tone is hard to pin down—some will find it pretentious.

Moonlight Mile poster

The Zero Theorem2013

Terry Gilliam's fractured, visually baroque film about a reclusive programmer tasked with proving that nothing matters. That same sense of characters colliding with an incomprehensible world. Weird and hypnotic.

But Gilliam's maximalism can feel like noise. The plot dissolves, the imagery overwhelms, and some find the whole thing indulgent and exhausting.

The Zero Theorem poster

Ebony, Ivory & Jade1976

A low-budget exploitation film with a woman at its center navigating a world indifferent to her. It has that same DIY energy and refusal to play by commercial rules that makes Fay Grim so odd.

But It's cheap-looking, narratively sketchy, and often incomprehensibly edited. Not a film that's earned its obscurity for reasons of quality.

Ebony, Ivory & Jade poster

A Prairie Home Companion2006

Robert Altman's final film, a musical about a radio show's last broadcast. Like Fay Grim, it's a slightly manic ensemble piece where style matters more than story. Tender and strange.

But Thin on plot, heavily stylized, and relies on your tolerance for theatrical whimsy. The music may grate, and the narrative payoff is minimal.

A Prairie Home Companion poster

Stalker1979

Both films use a globe-trotting narrative structure to explore larger questions about truth, desire, and what we believe vs. what is real.

Andrei Tarkovsky's meditative science-fiction masterpiece about three men journeying through a mysterious zone. Like Fay Grim, it's a quest narrative that becomes increasingly abstract and philosophical, exploring what we're actually searching for.

But It's a 163-minute slow-burn with no action, minimal dialogue, and ending ambiguity. It requires absolute patience and rewards only those willing to surrender to its pace.

Stalker poster

24 Hour Party People2002

Both films feature narrators/characters who cannot be trusted, and both gleefully admit that the story being told might be false—treating unreliability as comedy rather than a bug.

Michael Winterbottom's film about Tony Wilson and the Manchester music scene, narrated by Wilson himself breaking the fourth wall constantly. Like Fay Grim, it's a period-spanning narrative where the protagonist is unreliable and the style is more important than accuracy. Wildly entertaining.

But The documentary-comedy hybrid tone may feel gimmicky. And if you don't care about '80s Manchester music history, large chunks will bore you.

24 Hour Party People poster

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