‘Permission’ Is Terrible and Immature People Being Terrible and Immature

It begins with a strong premise: the movie Permission features the archetypical strong couple, the long-standing relationship that begun at a young age during your formative years and grew into a monument of love that will withstand the test of time. We all know that couple or, if you’re lucky, are part of one yourself. Protagonists Anna (Rebecca Hall) and Will (Dan Stevens) dinner with their best friends, Hale and Reece, another couple that collectively points out they’ve never been with other people romantically. While Hale (David Joseph Craig) finds it adorable, the brasher Reece (Morgan Spector) brings up the obvious quandary: how can you know you’re with the right person if you’ve never been with anyone else? How can you know if your sex is good if one person is all you know? Can you be certain about the greatness or strength of anything in isolation, without knowledge of anything else for comparison? The thought buries itself under the skin of their relationship as we, the audience, see the mundane nature of their relationship—the quick missionary sex, the value of practicality and familiarity over fun and adventure, the life of a couple on auto pilot as their relationship follows the beaten path of expectations. Permission then finds its form as a film exploring ethical non-monogamy, a less-comedic version of Hall Pass but more comedic than the season 2 episode of Netflix’s Easy.

As a whole, Permission’s charm lives in its moments of not taking itself too seriously, s…