Allswell in New York (2024) Movie Review: Has Its Moments but Feels Too Soap-Operatic for Its Own Good

Movies about siblings and their clashes, all related to their pasts, as well as their insecurities and their differentiating relationships with their parents, work in touching the heartstrings primarily because the drama is pulling from recognizable emotions. The tricky balance of ensuring that events play out for the conflict to occur and resolve while also keeping naturalistic tonalities at play is what separates soap operas from impactful drama. It also becomes an acting showcase for all the leads in the films as well.

Ben Snyder’s “Allswell in New York” suffers from a tonal as well as a focus problem. It has too many plots on its plate to finally hone in on the lives of the three Nuyorcan women at the center of the story. Daisy (Elizabeth Rodriguez) plans to bring in a surrogate parent to stay with her. As the story progresses, her happiness at finally experiencing motherhood is in sharp contrast to the dilemma that is being faced by the young surrogate. This leads to a revelation whose inevitability could have been taken into stride if not for the shock experienced by Daisy post said revelation, with Rodriguez’s heightened acting further exacerbating the situation.

For Ida (Lisa Gordon Zaylas), her job as a senior nurse is coming into jeopardy as she tries to protect her colleague who has been stealing STD kits for free treatment to the impoverished. This is, however, only one instance of numerous such instances that Ida apparently juggles throughout her life, whereby she is trying to “save everyone” and also trying to ensure her life remains intact. But this finally comes to fruition when she reconnects with her estranged brother, Desmond (Felix Solis), who is slowly dying from liver cirrhosis due to alcoholism.

His condition had driven his wife, Serene (Daphne Rubin-Vega), to leave him, taking their daughter Connie (Shyrley Rodriguez) with her. Meanwhile, Serene, who at one time used to be a lounge singer and now has lost her voice, is also going through her own tribulation regarding the grown-up Connie and how Serene’s own attitude, emblematic of immigrant parents, is clashing with her daughter’s sensibility and her life choices.

Allswell in New York (2024) — A still from “Allswell in New York” (2024)

There is also another subplot regarding Daisy’s restaurant, titled “Allswell,” and how she and her business partner Tim (Max Casella) have to deal with the flaky and whimsical nature of their fellow business partner, Dave (Bobby Cannavale). I am baffled that this is a subplot considering the name of the movie itself calls back to the restaurant in the narrative, signifying a much larger presence of the location than the film provides.

If all the above conglomeration of plots sounds like a lot, it is a lot. “Allswell in New York” is both overstuffed and undercooked because it has too many plots and backstories and doesn’t focus on the important ones. The relationship between the three women, reuniting for Desmond’s last days, should be the highlight of the film, as should the resultant conversations occurring between the three women, with the resultant tensions boiling over. There are, however, only two such memorable scenes where Rodriguez and Zaylas have an opportunity to flex their naturalistic acting muscles.

Rubin-Vega’s performance is in itself calling back to a telenovela sensibility, and the plot thread of her character losing her voice and struggling to let herself be heard should have carried more impact. Instead, it gets lost within the morass of the heightened acting by both Vega as well as Shyrley Rodriguez, whose angry outburst at the beginning of the film felt less like a volley of words and more like Rodriguez practicing a rap song. Elizabeth Rodriguez as Daisy doesn’t fare much better when she has to react with shock or anger. She fares much better in her moments of restraint, a sentiment that I admit usually works well for the movie itself.

“Allswell in New York” is a film intent on making New York City a character in itself but is unable to juggle the myriad of characters in a ninety-six-minute runtime. As a result, the movie becomes scattered and feels disjointed, with numerous plot threads not being resolved by the film’s end and the threads that are being resolved not imparting the sense of closure that the film expects to produce. The film is aided by the performances. Lisa Colon-Zaylas is given a mostly thankless role as the saintly sister, but she brings in her own sense of nuance even when the script has no room for it.

Elizabeth Rodriguez as Daisy shines when she is allowed to explore those similar nuances, especially in her conversations with Nina (Mackenzie Lanzig) and Connie. Her character arc of searching for family outside the norms of conventionality that allows her to connect to a younger generation far better than her sisters is an arc that perhaps needs to be explored more. Serene’s arc, on the other hand, of finally managing to connect with her husband and strive for reconnection with her daughter is the one arc that is completed to fruition, but the soap opera performances pull that entire arc’s impact down.

The color palette of the film shifts for each of the central characters—for Ida, it is usually light blue or sterile white, for Daisy it is shades of yellow, and for Serene it is mostly darker hues, all calling back to the tonalities that each of their arcs ideally are trying to convey. The central score by Mellisa McGregor connects all these disparate tonalities. The film is an unwieldy sum of its parts, with some parts having more memorable moments than others.