The Upside
Directed by Neil Burger
- comedy
- drama
The story
Phillip is a wealthy quadriplegic who needs a caretaker to help him with his day-to-day routine in his New York penthouse. He decides to hire Dell, a struggling parolee who's trying to reconnect with his ex and his young son. Despite coming from two different worlds, an unlikely friendship starts to blossom.
What it’s like
Bright Manhattan daylight pours through floor-to-ceiling windows into a sleek penthouse, with the city sprawling glassy and clean below, all polished digital sheen and warm, flattering skin tones. The camera stays steady and conventional, favouring easy two-shots across kitchen tables and quick montages of traffic and street life during car rides. The score is buoyant and piano-led, swelling into feel-good warmth whenever the two men find common ground. The vibe is warm, brisk and crowd-pleasing, with a thin undercurrent of gentle melancholy around illness and money, and it suits a lazy weekend afternoon, a comfort watch, or company on a long flight. The pace is quick and comic, built on banter and cheeky, sometimes crude humour, while the emotional arc follows a guarded wealthy man and a streetwise ex-convict slowly loosening each other up. Profanity and sexual jokes come often but stay light; violence is minimal and mostly spoken of rather than shown, with no gore. It is for viewers who want a heartfelt, easygoing buddy story that stays warm rather than hard-edged.
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