The Mason family has just moved from Michigan to the exclusive community of Palos Verdes, California. There's the noted heart surgeon father (Justin Kirk), the emotionally troubled mother (Jennifer Garner) and their extremely close twin siblings (Maika Monroe and Cody Fern).The film is narrated by Monroe's character Medina, as they all settle into their palatial home overlooking the gorgeous Pacific Ocean. However, all is not idyllic in this family, as we actually watch them deteriorate before our eyes.The acting is solid all around but I found the story led me on a depressive and mean-spirited slog, with the parents particularly despicable here as they manipulate their teenage kids for their own purposes no matter what the cost. Without giving too much away here, the cost will be very high.Overall, some may find this unrelenting melodrama to their liking but for me it was a difficult view and far from entertaining.

This movie is has some good points. At first it seem this might be some OC style affluent enclave drama by the sea but it's a bit more serious. A surgeon father brings his family to the exclusive Palos Verdes CA but soon after leaves his wife for his realtor. Jennifer Gardner acts well as the wife who loses it totally and depends too much on her teenage kids. She doesn't have that out of place perkiness that she usually has. Alicia Silverstone plays the other woman. There is a special bond between the brother and sister who are twins. She is a loner surfer type. He is a more easy going guy who unfortunately turns to drugs. This movie turned out to be quite unsettling maybe a bit too many things go wrong and the adults are just so hopeless with a totally selfish dad and a basket case mom.

Another reviewer referred to this film as "cruel." I think a better word is "sad." It was quite well done. Despite anticipating the brother's demise, I was moved to tears at the end. The film did a great job of showing the complexities of being in a nuclear family in the 21st century, though, to be honest, I wasn't sure of the time frame until Facebook was mentioned. In most films that take place today the cell phone plays a major role and in this film it didn't, though they did Skype. Anyway, Jennifer Garner is usually not a favorite of mine, but her acting in this film was excellent as was Maika Monroe's. The complex emotions exchanged by the members of this broken upper middle class family were realistic, palpable, and multi-dimensional. For example, it would have been easy to simply hate the father (Justin Kirk) for falling out of love with his wife and leaving his family for another one, yet one scene in which he explains himself to his daughter, bore some truths which made me feel empathy for him as well as the others. The story was presented with depth which is what made it successful, in my opinion. It's not a happy film, or even particularly hopeful, but it is a realistic slice of life and engrossing.

This is a very good movie, people and characters in it are all look real. The broken marriages to so many families nowadays in almost every country of the world not only affected so many husbands and wives but also seriously messed up their children. America's social infrastructure is like a broken and shattered glass, so many broken families, so many toilet relationships, so many twisted hardship that kids have to deal with their parents' bad marriage. America has become a weird family tree, its branches and leaves so complicated, either the wives carried their kids to new marriage, or the husbands brought their kids from his first, second or even 3rd marriage to newest wives, while their newer wives or husbands also got their own kids from their former marriages. More divorces simply complicated the family tree's growth and burdened it to unknown, unpredictable and unfathomable abyss. Kids growing up from such broken families many have twisted views almost to everything that ensured them to repeat the same or similar situations of their own marriages, their relationship to their opposite gender. They would become a bad copy of their parents and usually, the 2nd or the 3rd copy will be always worse than its 1st edition.This is a very cruel but up close and personal film that I could hardly be able to watch to the end. I pity the three young children from two different broken families. The hardships they have to deal with 24/7 are so cruel and unbearable. I felt so sad while watching it and couldn't resist thinking of my elder son's broken marriage, and the grandson jammed in between his mother and father. The hardship my son has to deal with everyday is beyond every word could be described. This film is just too cruel to watch.....