Part of Sundance Film Festival: US Dramatic Competition.

When 26-year-old Anna becomes a gestational surrogate to a single, middle-aged app designer named Matt, she expects only a transactional bit of good karma and the payday that will allow her to finish her college degree. But as Matt’s unbridled enthusiasm for impending parenthood leads him to persistently insert himself into her life and invite her into his, the initially annoyed Anna finds herself reluctantly charmed. The pair of self-described loners gradually open up to each other, give in to the intimacy of their admittedly finite shared experience, and forge an unlikely friendship.

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith (Stockholm, Pennsylvania, 2015 Sundance Film Festival) returns with a film that eschews rom-com conventions and subverts expectations of traditional gender dynamics—instead paying tribute to the deeply felt and regenerative power of platonic love. Featuring the boldly mismatched casting of comedy icon Ed Helms and sharp-tongued newcomer Patti Harrison, Together Together depicts the surrogacy process with melancholy and warmth, embedding a distinctively awkward humor within its palpable tenderness for these not-at-all hopeless loners.