Basic: So Obsessed (With Your Ex) | SXSW 2026
Are we less because we don't have perfect lips? Or a more stable job? Bad cause we aren't as smart as someone else is? No, as Basic illustrates, how somebody chooses to live their life isn't a funhouse mirror for yours.
I don't think I really had any expectations about Basic, really, the wild card of my festival coverage. Leighton Meester. Ashley Park. An incredibly relatable premise anyone could get behind was all I knew. But having seen it, though it isn't my favorite watch this week, it's definitely the film I most want to see succeed: an indie comedy, touched by magically realistic paranoia, that soars above its low-budget limits to find some kind of middle ground between jealousy and acceptance. Semi-autobiographical, brutally honest, and deserving of distribution ASAP.
Gloria (Ashley Park) has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend Nick (Taylor John Smith), after Instagram spiraling her way through his past dating history brought her insecurities to the fore, especially when she compares herself to Kaylin (Leighton Meester), his most recent ex before her, a hot, blonde, the poster girl for basic. Too drunk to make any reasonable decisions, Gloria stalks the object of her envy to confront her, only to find they're much more alike than either realized. Chelsea Devantez, known for her work writing for Girls5Eva and the gone-too-soon sitcom Not Dead Yet, laces her feature debut with wry humor and a confessional edge, Basic going Fleabag-esque as these women take turns narrating their chaos, mess, and the interior dimensions of their lives. The script is sharp but never cutting, the film recognizing the universality of choosing to feed the insecure devil on your shoulder over your better angels.
I've been a fan of Ashley Park ever since she originated the role of Gretchen in Mean Girls on Broadway, and when she's not forced to do the slop we call Emily in Paris, she gets to be really phenomenally funny; it was true in Joy Ride and especially so here. Gloria is a prickly character to get right, reserved and judgmental, yet Park expertly delivers a performance that pokes fun at her sob story without denying it the sincerity to matter. Meester sheds her Blair Waldorf image like snakeskin and thrives playing someone idealized like an impossible Barbie doll, but is actually down to earth, normal, just as screwed up as her beholder. What impresses me most about Basic is how it humanizes these characters; both Gloria and Kaylin are written as three-dimensional people with flaws and foibles, even if they're too caught up in social-media distance to realize it. The film dispels the rigid double bind of likability politics—who's the villain, who's the victim, or actually it's the man who’s the problem—by sticking true to the fact that life is a lot more complicated than the flattened version of it that our screens reflect back to us.
Researching your ex obsessively is a power rush with diminishing returns, and what Devantez illuminates is that it has a debilitating effect on how we see ourselves. Are we less because we don't have perfect lips? Or a more stable job? Bad cause we aren't as smart as someone else is? No, as Basic illustrates, how somebody chooses to live their life isn't a funhouse mirror for yours. Over the course of their night, Gloria and Kaylin get a chance to see each other from outside in, and one-sided feud turns to tentative friendship—or at least tolerance—in the process. So though we can't always curtail our vices, maybe we can use them as a life lesson. Ease the weight comparison puts on us. It's all that we can hope for.
