Freelance writer Margot (Michelle Williams) meets bewitching artist Daniel (Luke Kirby) at a Nova Scotia museum. Then they just happen to sit next to each other on the flight home, where they make small talk. But only after they share a cab back to Margot’s suburban Toronto neighbourhood do they realise that they live across the street from each other. Clearly, the universe is trying to tell them something, but there’s one fairly major stumbling block: Margot is five-years married – happily, she thinks – to cookbook author Lou (Seth Rogen).

A lesser film might have quickly plopped Margot and Daniel into bed, while turning Lou into a comic cuckold. But writer-director Sarah Polley favours a more sensitive approach to charting Margot’s recognition that her affections lie elsewhere.

There’s so much that’s right about the film: the Altman-like bustle of its party scenes, and the most pathos-infused use of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ ever. Yet Polley’s dialogue is often unbearably clumsy – Margot admits to having problems making ‘connections’ (she means airplane connections… no, really). And the troubling turns that the story takes, which are meant as a rebuke to happily-ever-after stereotypes, are much more interesting in conception than they are in execution.