''Mercury in Retrograde'' is a 2017 American

drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-g ...

written and directed by Michael Glover Smith, and starring French actress

Roxane Mesquida Roxane Mesquida (born 1 October 1981) is a French-American actress and model based in Los Angeles. Mesquida grew up in Le Pradet, a little town located in southern France. Her mother, writer Françoise Mesquida, is French/Spanish and her father ...

. The film follows three couples from

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

as they navigate personal challenges while vacationing together for a weekend in southwestern

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

. The film premiered at the 2017 Full Bloom Film Festival in

Statesville, North Carolina Statesville is a city in and the county seat of Iredell County, North Carolina, United States, and it is part of the Charlotte metropolitan area. Statesville was established in 1789 by an act of the North Carolina Legislature. The population was r ...

where it won the Best Narrative Feature award.

Plot

Three couples from

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

vacation together for a weekend at a lakeside cabin in

: Isabelle and Richard have been together for five years and are deeply unhappy; Jack and Golda have been happily married for 10 years; and Peggy and Wyatt just started dating and don't yet know each other well. Over the course of three days in this relationship drama, hidden tensions and secrets slowly come to the surface.

Background and production

In an interview at RogerEbert.com, Smith discussed the notion of vacations being "anything but an escape" as the impetus for the film: "The fact that the characters are away from their daily routine serves as a catalyst to examine their lives and relationships. These couples are interacting with each other n this new settingand it forces them to see their own relationships in a new light". He also mentioned German director

F. W. Murnau Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe; December 28, 1888March 11, 1931) was a German film director, producer and screenwriter. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at t ...

as an influence, noting how the films '' Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans'' and ''City Girl'' are "about couples moving from either the city to the country or vice versa, and about the kind of psychological shift that occurs to accompany the geographical shift". Production of the film took place over two weeks in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

and

Fennville, Michigan Fennville is a city in Allegan County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 1,745 at the 2020 census. Located on M-89 on the boundary between Manlius Township to the north and Clyde Township to the south, Fennville is located abou ...

in August 2016.

Cast

as Isabelle * Najarra Townsend as Peggy * Alana Arenas as Golda * Jack C. Newell as Jack * Shane Simmons as Wyatt * Kevin Wehby as Richard

Release

Among the film's theatrical screenings:

Spectacle Theater Spectacle Theater is a collectively run, independent movie theater that operates out of a small space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York, United States. History Spectacle Theater opened in September 2010 at 124 S. 3rd Street in Brooklyn in ...

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, Rooftop Cinema Club NeueHouse in

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

, and the

Gene Siskel Film Center The Gene Siskel Film Center, formerly The Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and commonly referred to as The Film Center or The Gene Siskel, is the cinematheque attached to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It ...

and the

Music Box Theatre The Music Box Theatre is a Broadway theater at 239 West 45th Street ( George Abbott Way) in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1921, the Music Box Theatre was designed by C. Howard Crane in a Palladian-inspir ...

's "Virtual Cinema" (after the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

) in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, as well as the

Tallahassee Tallahassee ( ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In 2020, the population ...

Film Festival (where it won the award for Best Narrative Feature).

Home Video

Emphasis Entertainment Group released a special edition

Blu-ray The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of sto ...

of the film on September 6, 2019. It was announced in 2021 that

Music Box Films Music Box Films is a distributor of foreign and independent film in theatrical, DVD/Blu-ray, and video-on-demand markets in the United States. Based in Chicago, Music Box Films is independently owned and operated by the Southport Music Box Corpor ...

had acquired VOD rights for their Music Box Direct streaming service.

Reception

''Mercury in Retrograde'' has received generally favorable reviews for its writing, acting, and directing. Among the positive notices were a three-star review by the ''

Chicago Sun-Times The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the ''Chicago T ...

'''

Richard Roeper Richard E. Roeper (born October 17, 1959) is an American columnist and film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times''. He co-hosted the television series '' At the Movies'' with Roger Ebert from 2000 to 2008, serving as the late Gene Siskel's success ...

who called it "absolutely beautiful...a smart, funny, quietly effective and authentic slice of older millennial life", and a ''

Chicago Reader The ''Chicago Reader'', or ''Reader'' (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a ...

'' review that deemed it "an observant, nuanced indie". As of May 2021,

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

shows an approval rating of 71%, based on seven reviews.

External links

Cast and director interviews
at Indie Outlook.
Mercury in Retrograde
at IMDb
Offscreen
interview with Michael Glover Smith

References

{{Reflist 2017 films 2017 drama films Films set in Chicago American drama films Films set in Michigan 2010s English-language films 2010s American films