Dir: Jon Lucas/Scott Moore | Comedy 2026
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore’s Spa Weekend arrives with the deceptively simple proposition that four women who desperately need to relax are probably the least likely people to manage it. In the hands of the directors of The Hangover and Bad Moms, the spa is less a place of tranquillity than a pressure cooker dressed in fluffy robes.
Jane (Leslie Mann), Coco (Michelle Buteau) and Sophie (Anna Faris) arrive in Palm Springs hoping to reclaim some time for themselves. Their carefully organised escape is derailed when Mel (Isla Fisher), the unpredictable friend who was conspicuously not part of the plan, turns up. From that moment, the film takes pleasure in systematically dismantling the idea of wellness.
What makes the film work is the chemistry of its four leads. Mann gives Jane a recognisable mixture of exhaustion and suppressed frustration; Buteau supplies a sharper, more self-aware comic rhythm; Faris brings her gift for playing apparently normal people pushed beyond the limits of normal behaviour. Fisher, meanwhile, understands that Mel is funniest when she isn’t behaving as though she knows she’s in a comedy.
Lucas and Moore shoot the spa itself almost as a fantasy landscape: pristine interiors, carefully cultivated calm and the expensive paraphernalia of modern self-care. Against this immaculate backdrop they unleash increasingly unruly behaviour. The visual joke is simple but effective — the more desperately the surroundings insist on serenity, the less serene these women become.
The film’s weakness is that its comic machinery is sometimes visible. Once the weekend begins to unravel, the next catastrophe can feel inevitable rather than genuinely surprising. Some of the broader gags are less funny than the smaller moments between the women, when old resentments, loyalties and embarrassments bubble to the surface.
Yet beneath the silliness Lucas and Moore have something rather sweeter in mind. The spa becomes an excuse to examine the peculiar exhaustion of adulthood: careers, partners, families and obligations gradually consuming the friendships that once seemed effortless. The film’s best idea is that self-care isn’t really about facials or massages; it is about finding your way back to people with whom you can temporarily stop being responsible.
That gives Spa Weekend more emotional substance than its succession of outrageous set pieces might suggest. It isn’t sophisticated comedy, nor is it trying to be. Its pleasure lies in watching four exceptionally accomplished comic actors turn friendship, irritation and accumulated baggage into a weekend that refuses to remain relaxing.
A glossy, unruly comedy in which the real treatment isn’t the spa — it’s four old friends being allowed to misbehave together.
IN UK CINEMAS Friday