Writer/director Angus MacLachlan has built a career mapping the dynamics of functional and dysfunctional families. A Little Prayer slots neatly in alongside earlier films such as 2014’s Goodbye to All That and 2017’s Abundant Acreage Available. You could add his stage play The Dead Eye Boy to the list. I’ve not seen any of them but having now seen A Little Prayer I’d be interested in having a look, because MacLachlan has made an interesting drama in a genre I don’t generally have much time for.
We’re in smalltown America where the tightly knit family of Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) is having a moment. Their son, David (Will Pullen) and his wife Tammy (Jane Levy) live in a house built on Bill and Venida’s property and David helps Bill run his business. All is well in the world, or appears to be, until one day Bill catches just a momentary flicker of something between David and Narcedalia (Dascha Polanco), the pneumatic hottie who totters around the office in perilously high heels. Are they, you know, doing it? And if so, what should Bill do about it – say something to the much loved Tammy? Confront David? Warn Narcedalia off? All of the above?
Complicating things more than a touch is Patti, Bill and Venida’s daughter, who suddenly arrives unannounced, having just left her abusive, user husband… again. Patti is trouble, a live wire who’ll speak out when discretion would be the better part of valour. Being a bit of a bad girl herself, she instantly spots that David is playing away. Given that Patti refers to her sister-in-law Tammy as “little Miss Perfect”, there is obviously trouble brewing.
Those are our characters in the snowglobe, which is given a shake every now and again by the arrival of a tiny but significant bit of new information, or a new character, to put the main players through their paces. But essentially it’s David and his affair – all taking place off stage – and the family’s reaction to it. Lovely Tammy in her smock tops; gaudy Narcedalia in her fuck-me outfits, which cat is going to get the cream? Not that David is that much of a catch, that’s part of the fascination.
How well drawn all these people are, how purely and simply MacLachlan shoots them, trusting his actors to do the work, which they do. Strathairn is as ever excellent, walking the line between being a concerned dad and a busybody who should butt out of other people’s lives. Weston, as Venida, comes increasingly to the fore, the socially skilled wife who’s worked out what’s going on long before Bill has. Jane Levy gets the film’s best scene, and I won’t say what it is but the camera tracks her down a corridor after a momentous event while a riot of emotions plays across Tammy’s face. They are all so good though – Anna Camp, as Patti, you might know from the Pitch Perfect movies but she’s operating on a different scale here.
Imagine living in a house on the property owned by your parents or parents-in-law? That’s the visual this film spins on. The loving, supportive small town full of old friends, where everything is to hand. Versus the smothering oppressiveness of everything being too close, too much personal knowledge being public and a nest that can be seen by all if someone is going to foul it.
Perhaps sensing that the men are being left in the shade by his writing, MacLachlan adds an army-veteran angle – Bill was in Vietnam and David also has some history serving his country in some non-specified conflict. Maybe David came home with PTSD, and maybe he’s having an affair as a way of dealing with that. Or, just possibly, David is taking after his dad, who might have had a wild youth too. I’m over-describing, because MacLachlan gives only so much space to these character wrinkles before cutting them off.
See those, if you like, as part of the “to be continued…” aspect of this film, which manages to be both familiar and yet fascinating. As said, I don’t normally like this sort of thing much.
A Little Prayer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
