I’ll be honest with you – committed pessimist that I am, pseudo-incest was still not a square on my 2026 bingo card. But then along comes Alice and Steve to prove me wrong! It’s nice to find that life still has ways to surprise you.
The titular characters are best friends and have been since they met at university, 30-plus years ago. Alice (Nicola Walker) is on her second marriage, to a sweet, contented beta-male (Daniel, played by Joel Fry) to her alpha-woman; he is 10 years younger than she is. They have a teenage son, and have raised her daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith) from childhood. Izzy is now 26 and just back home after breaking up with her boyfriend.
Steve (Jemaine Clement) is a hairstylist, single since his wife left him four years ago. “I wish I was in love and had a baby,” he tells her as they drink their sorrows away after a friend’s funeral. “You deserve to be loved,” says Alice, and recommends finding a younger woman who can do this and give him a bouncing infant too.
Guess what? Ten minutes later, he is on Alice’s sofa having it away with Izzy, whom he has known since she was born. It’s OK because Izzy is a confident 26-year-old who knows her own mind and she came on to him, this man she has known since childhood. And this is the first major sign of the fatal flaw in the whole endeavour: having come with a premise that contains a large element of ick, and upon whose success will depend the deep exploitation and interrogation of that ick, creator Sophie Goodhart then spends the entire time running away from it.
Ick factor? … Jemaine Clement as Steve with Yali Topol Margalith as Izzy in Alice and Steve. Photograph: Lara Cornell/Disney+
The poor man, we are given to understand over the next six half-hours, each of which feels interminable, is not a predator. Just a bit weak and lonely. This means that instead of asking difficult, interesting questions while this juicy setup plays out – about inherent power differentials and whether inexperienced people are ever in command of a situation involving experienced people of any kind – we get something closer to the shrugging “What’s a fella to do?!” vibe that feels both dated and wrong.
We are meant to sympathise with Steve because he occasionally tells Alice he feels bad about the relationship and what it’s doing to her, but nothing about him or his actions earn anything like it. The fact that your best friend’s daughter likes Willie Nelson when the other twentysomething you just tried to chat up in a bar hadn’t even heard of him does not make it kismet. We are repeatedly told that the sex is incredible. I suspect at least half of these lines had to be added when it became clear that the on-screen chemistry between the actors was nil. Margalith does her best, but Clement looks embarrassed throughout.
Alice quickly finds out about the relationship, goes off the deep end and stays there. It’s not much of a character arc. Alice begins as impetuous and self-centred – indeed a marrow-deep selfishness may be the only thing she and Steve have in common – and remains so through a series of borderline-imbecilic attempts to destroy their relationship. She invites the pair and Izzy’s young friends to a dinner party and makes an angry fool of herself. This largely continues unabated; the lack of sympathy for the character would be a worthy study. She is so firmly written as a shrew – given nothing other than broadbrush outrage to voice in a situation that could be mined for extraordinary detail and nuance – that even an actor as skilled as Walker can do virtually nothing else with the part.
A few unimaginative twists ensue. A far more touching and believable relationship develops between son Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce) and his crush Rome (Eilidh Fisher), though it’s never integrated into the main narrative, and Daniel’s quiet suffering is more moving than anything else on display. And the ending is ridiculous but all of a piece with a main story in which nothing is convincing or authentic and nothing is earned or resolved. The ick is the least of Alice and Steve’s problems.
Alice and Steve is on Disney+ now
