{"id":47448,"date":"2026-04-11T08:07:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T08:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=47448"},"modified":"2026-04-11T08:07:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T08:07:17","slug":"another-happy-day-euphoria-rewatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=47448","title":{"rendered":"‘Another Happy Day,’ ‘Euphoria’ Rewatch"},"content":{"rendered":"


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On Friday nights,\u00a0IndieWire After Dark<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with\u00a0midnight movies\u00a0from any moment in\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0history.<\/em><\/p>\n

First, the\u00a0BAIT<\/strong>: a weird genre pick, and why we\u2019re exploring its specific niche\u00a0right now.\u00a0Then, the\u00a0BITE<\/strong>: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question,\u00a0\u201cIs this old cult film actually worth recommending?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Bait: A Pioneering Disappointment from Sam Levinson<\/h2>\n

Before helping HBO turn modern teen misery into a glittery, marketable aesthetic, writer\/director Sam Levinson<\/a> made his feature directorial debut with a mostly forgotten, deeply twisted <\/em>indie film. Premiered at Sundance in 2011, the caustic \u201cAnother Happy Day<\/a>\u201d now plays less like a dark family dramedy \u2014 and more like a campy reminder of what to expect from Levinson and the upcoming \u201cEuphoria\u201d Season 3.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

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Stripped of the vibey, hip-hop style Levinson would later deploy in 2018\u2019s \u201cAssassination Nation,\u201d this pitch-black comedy leaves its auteur with almost nowhere to hide. Set amidst a chaotic wedding in suburban Maryland, where troubled teen Elliott Hellman (Ezra Miller) wanders through a minefield of emotional violence, this simple scripts sees Levinson paint yet another portrait of young addiction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The tense dynamic between Elliott and his mother Lynn (Ellen Barkin) feels like a rough draft for the witty resentment shared by Rue and her mom on \u201cEuphoria<\/a>.\u201d But without Zendaya\u2019s magnetic presence, and the dreamy production and costume design afforded to Levinson by that massive HBO budget, \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d spirals downward into a loud, nihilistic thud.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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This wildly imperfect movie is worth revisiting only if you\u2019re the kind of person who believes a cinematic oddity can double as a divisive filmography\u2019s smoking gun. Oscillating between love and hate with remarkable volatility, the family members at the heart of \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d are truly awful to behold. That\u2019s partly because their bleak ending feels like a foregone conclusion from the start, even as Levinson\u2019s frequently funny script crackles with comic depravity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The same could be said of \u201cEuphoria,\u201d which has struggled since Season 1 as much from a sense of tonal aimlessness and inconsistency as it has repeated production delays. For all its talk of shocking Gen-Z specificity, Levinson\u2019s TV show has also ushered its mostly teen cast into adulthood without answering many questions that are key to the coming-of-age subgenre.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) Phase 4 Films\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From Rue\u2019s endless cycle of relapse and recrimination, to that profoundly humiliating hot tub scene in Season 2, \u201cEuphoria\u201d knows how to depict adolescent pain in a powerful and provocative way. But even at the beginning of his directing career with \u201cAnother Happy Day,\u201d Levinson doesn\u2019t seem to know what he wants all that pubescent suffering to mean. You can blame the filmmaker\u2019s uneven trajectory in prestige television on behind-the-scenes hardships, or the pressure created by his series\u2019 global success. But Levinson\u2019s very first movie suggests there\u2019s something more integral missing from his creative formula.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Frequently mistaken for Levinson\u2019s debut, the internet age crime thriller \u201cAssassination Nation\u201d from 2018 feels like a jolt by comparison. That\u2019s not because it\u2019s deeper than this film, but because Levinson got smarter about covering up his\u00a0emotional seams with spectacle. Rendered before the age of social media properly arrived, \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d sees Elliott and his younger brother Ben (Daniel Yelsky) document the wedding\u2019s worst moments on a camcorder. That self-awareness reads more claustrophobic than kinetic here, and as an After Dark pick, the result sits in a strange but compelling pocket.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a cult favorite, and it\u2019s not \u201cso bad\u201d that it\u2019s good. Still, \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d is too bizarre to be remembered as a straightforward affair, and plenty about it feels custom-made for the midnight crowd. The film opens on a taboo conversation about whether you can find a relative hot, then spends the rest of its runtime skirting similarly fraught edges with a shrugging, almost bored wit. It never reaches the transgressive heights of something like Todd Solondz\u2019s \u201cHappiness,\u201d but it gets close enough to make you wonder why Levinson doesn\u2019t (or can\u2019t?) dig deeper.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) Phase 4 Films\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A stacked ensemble, including Ellen Burstyn, Demi Moore, and Thomas Haden Church, gamely navigates a story that can\u2019t quite balance their talents. Characters drift in and out with hazy importance, and emotional arcs stall or disappear entirely. The whole endeavor feels less intentional than it does unresolved \u2014 lending credence to complaints that Levinson has a habit of abandoning too many ideas mid-thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to \u201cEuphoria.\u201d The third and final season comes to HBO this Sunday night, and if nothing else, revisiting Levinson\u2019s strange indie film debut from 2011 will make any possible disappointment that comes with it easier to stand. Wilson, what do you think? Is this a midnight movie worth rewatching, or just another lackluster project history should skip? \u2014AF <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) is streaming free on Tubi. <\/em><\/p>\n

The Bite: The Director Who Won\u2019t Grow Up <\/h2>\n

There are very few TV shows that feel as intertwined with a specific time and place in my life as Season 1 of \u201cEuphoria\u201d does with the summer of 2019. Released the month before I turned 20 and left my teenage years behind forever, Levinson\u2019s moody high school drama (which I recall cheekily coining \u201c\u2018Degrassi\u2019 on valium\u201d to a friend) hit me at a tender, liminal period of my pseudo-adolescence.<\/p>\n

Spending my vacation as an (incompetent) intern in Washington D.C., my parents were going through the beginning stages of their divorce back home on Long Island. So, I wasted many nights wandering around an unfamiliar city where I had no connections to tether me. Every Sunday, I would retreat back to the George Washington University dorm room I had rented out and find escape in the neon-soaked glamor that enveloped Levinson\u2019s messy cast of party kids, alt girls, rich bros, and broke slackers.<\/p>\n

Even then, I recognized the abundant flaws in the writer\/director\u2019s artistic vision. For all the aesthetic accomplishments of the HBO series (the lush cinematography meticulously crafted as catnip for \u201cOne Perfect Shot\u201d Twitter accounts), its grasp on basic plot and character development proved much shakier. The majority of the large \u201cEuphoria\u201d ensemble failed to rise above the base archetypes they embodied. I watched the series primarily for Zendaya\u2019s Rue: a character who I didn\u2019t share many biographical details with but who I nonetheless found a version of myself in. Both Rue\u2019s detachment from the world and the yearning she felt for something more mirrored where I was entering the next decade of my life.<\/p>\n

I remember watching the final scene of \u201cEuphoria\u201d Season 1 \u2014\u00a0which cast aside the shackles of its story in favor of a musical sequence that pressed even deeper into Rue\u2019s emotional state\u00a0\u2014 and feeling shaken afterwards. The sequence remains the peak of Levinson\u2019s abilities as far as I\u2019m concerned. It\u2019s a moment that marries his talent for flashy set-pieces with palpable, burning feeling that\u2019s typically out of his reach. <\/p>\n

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\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) Phase 4 Films\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Ali selected Levinson\u2019s \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d for IndieWire After Dark<\/a> this week, pitching it as a correction to those who believe \u201cAssassination Nation\u201d was Levinson\u2019s first directorial effort (which, guilty!), she told me that Miller\u2019s teen drug addict Elliott was essentially a prototype for Rue. That\u2019s undeniably true. In his emotional breakdowns, Elliott buckles under his testy relationship with his mother Lynn and then wanders through gatherings and parties with a perpetually dazed expression. What he undergoes in \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d serves as a blueprint for Rue\u2019s Season 1 storyline \u2014 although, the film premiered at a time when Zendaya was still just a bright, happy tween dancing on Disney\u2019s \u201cShake It Up.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, despite that, I finished Levinson\u2019s debut film curiously unaffected by Elliot and his story. That\u2019s not just because Miller\u2019s presence rings bittersweet given the actor\u2019s real life struggles and controversies today, but also because this relatively modest affair lacks most of Levinson\u2019s aesthetic and bombast. (That said, there is an artful oner of Lynn collapsing onto the lawn in despair that does her director\u2019s eye for image composition proud.) The domestic drama lays bare many of Levinson\u2019s weaknesses as a writer, and the script reveals fault lines and blind spots in Levinson\u2019s craft that he hasn\u2019t corrected in the years to come.<\/p>\n

A tonally confused family drama that can\u2019t decide if it wants to sneer and gawk at this exceptionally nasty clan of upper-middle DMV-area WASPs \u2014 or <\/em>make us truly, profoundly pity them \u2014 \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d bundles together the slew of preoccupations that have appeared throughout Levinson\u2019s movie career. Addiction. Depression. Generational trauma. White kids adopting street culture. Here, the weed-smoking rapper cousin who casually uses the N-word is the most classic Levinson trope, but the written material is as charged and soapy as ever. This 2011 indie debut feels like Levinson throwing emotional grenades on the floor but forgetting to take the pins out, and the plot rarely enters territory that\u2019s truly compelling. <\/p>\n

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\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) Phase 4 Films\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Levinson has been open about experiencing addiction as a teen and young adult, so it\u2019s no surprise those themes double as his freshman film\u2019s most affecting elements. An early scene where Lynn confronts Elliott about using drugs again feels born from Levinson\u2019s lived experience, and the filmmaker went on to eventually restage that conversation several times during \u201cEuphoria.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d starts at emotional bedrock and doesn\u2019t know how to push upward. The end result is a tiring slog that circles Lynn, Elliott, and the rest of their toxic family\u2019s oozing psychological wounds without knowing how to address or heal them \u2014\u00a0and the film concludes on a hazy note of ambiguity that feels more like a cop out than a symbol of life\u2019s earnest and open-ended nature.<\/p>\n

Levinson\u2019s inability to go deeper than the surface, to make the pain he finds so artistically fascinating feel meaningful, is a major failing that\u2019s tarnished every project he\u2019s made since this one. After the mostly enjoyable excess of \u201cEuphoria\u201d Season 1, the series\u2019 sophomore outing collapsed on itself, forgoing a strong examination of its imperfected characters in favor of a tangle of repetitive, half-formed subplots. Other works, like Netflix\u2019s \u201cMalcolm & Marie\u201d and HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Idol,\u201d proved frustratingly shallow. Sure, they were provocative, but they neglected to find original ideas sincerely worth prodding.<\/p>\n

Barkin, who was dating Levinson at the time of the film\u2019s production, gamely strives to anchor the odd, histrionic film with her performance and wrings real pathos out of Lynn\u2019s brittle and wounded demeanor. Of course, Barkin and the rest of the cast are underserved by an uneven film caught in an awkward place between arch black comedy and grounded, gritty drama. \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d is the type of feature that is neither funny nor affecting. But its blunt, inelegant dialogue is peppered with characters (metaphorically) vomiting up their darkest secrets. It leaves them at a strange plateau: effectively incapable of steadily rising in intensity while their words are constantly veering into melodrama.<\/p>\n

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\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) Phase 4 Films\/courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It struck me, while watching \u201cAnother Happy Day,\u201d how ill-equipped Levinson is when it comes to writing actual adults. His 2021 Netflix film \u201cMalcolm & Marie\u201d felt like two theater kids play-acting a version of \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?\u201d sorely lacking real venom, while \u201cThe Idol\u201d could only render its pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) as a little girl lost. \u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d is ostensibly a film about adults ruminating on their pasts, but when it turns away from Lynn\u2019s relationship with Elliot or her depressed daughter Alice (Kate Bosworth) to focus on her concern over her mother (Burstyn) or the resentment that simmers between her and her ex-husband\u2019s new wife Patty (Moore), the film falters, never conjuring a real sense of history to spill out from within Elliott\u2019s cynical and unlikable extended family.<\/p>\n

Yes, Levinson was a young adult, only 25, when he made \u201cAnother Happy Day,\u201d but it\u2019s notable that his most successful projects have all been about teenagers, people who are half-formed or still discovering themselves, and those without inner lives for a writer to sketch and tease. Early in the 2011 movie, Elliott invokes Peter Pan in a mocking comment about his half-brother Dylan (Michael Nardelli), whose nuptials are what brought him and Lynn to this lawn-scaped circle of hell. Watching the scene, I couldn\u2019t help but think that the boy who stayed a child forever was a fitting figure to have stand in for Levinson himself.<\/p>\n

I have fond memories of \u201cEuphoria\u201d Season 1, but seven years, one pandemic, and a diploma later, I\u2019m a different person. No longer the 19-year-old who felt seen by the angst of Rue and Jules, but someone who has grown up and put that life behind him. Having watched \u201cAnother Happy Day,\u201d I\u2019m not quite sure Levinson ever did the same. \u2014WC<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAnother Happy Day\u201d (2011) is streaming free on Tubi. <\/em><\/p>\n

Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire\u2019s midnight movie rewatch club:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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On Friday nights,\u00a0IndieWire After Dark\u00a0honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with\u00a0midnight movies\u00a0from any moment in\u00a0film\u00a0history. First, the\u00a0BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we\u2019re exploring…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertaonment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}