Metacritic reviews

Lemon represents a feature debut of unusual assurance and control with a style all its own.

This is a filmmaker precise in her composition and in her texture, her comedic beats reminiscent of both David Lynch and Issa Rae.

Enhanced by a number of notable comedic actors entering uncharted terrain, it’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh and flinch in equal measures, and despite some messier twists, never ceases to move in surprising directions.

Lemon remains wholly original throughout, rendering old themes fresh with its bold perspective. It’s also incredibly funny, even when it’s dunking our heads into the darkness of the human psyche.

Lemon is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches.

The debut feature by Janicza Bravo takes on a perennial comic genre yet, like its main character, it’s best described as a work in progress.

Lemon is a comedy of miserablism that keeps poking you in the ribs — and, quite often, fails to hit the rib it’s aiming for. Yet it’s a watchable curio, because beneath it all the director, the Panamanian-born Janicza Bravo, has a more conventional sensibility than she lets on.

Most of the humor stems from the humiliation of its protagonist — the binding thereof — and it is all quite funny, in a demented, cringy way that makes it difficult to sit through. Here, Bravo’s experience directing theater shows, as long extended shots with exquisite framing wring out the painful anxiety in each scene.

Gelman and Bravo, who wrote the script together, are married in real life, a fact that somehow makes Lemon’s mix of broad caricature and broader relationship metaphors even clumsier.

Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.