There’s something to be said about a film that embraces a “low stakes energy” and has fun for fun’s sake. That’s what you get in Jeff Baena’s latest, Spin Me Round. Baena (Life After Beth, The Little Hours) and Alison Brie team up again as co-writers, post-their 2020 indie darling Horse Girl, to tell a comedically awkward story of an idyllic trip gone very wrong.

Alison Brie plays Amber, a manager of an Italian restaurant chain in Sacramento, who has been selected to join other franchise managers in attending an all-expenses-paid, educational immersion program in Italy. Her initial excitement and expectation that this would be the trip of a lifetime quickly become less romantic and more questionable when faced with the reality of this “opportunity”. The accommodations are barely a step above a sub-par college dormitory, the hosts of the program don’t really seem to know what they’re doing, and the local celebrity chef (Alessandro Nivola) and his assistant (Aubrey Plaza) seem to be overly fascinated in alienating the women from the program for their own personal pleasure. Something’s off here.

Where Baena and Brie take this film is never totally clear, and that’s the fun to be had. We don’t know where we’re going and the final reveal is completely off-the-wall bonkers (you’ll never see it coming). While the humor from the script only takes the film so far, what pushes it to LOL territory is the who’s who in the ensemble cast. Spin Me Round enlists some of the best comedy actors working today, including Molly Shannon, Zach Woods, Tim Heidecker, Debby Ryan, and Fred Armisen.

In the small Baena/Brie canon, however, Spin Me Round falls short compared to their first feature Horse Girl. Sure, these two movies serve different purposes and can’t be matched head to head, but Spin Me Round lacks the vibrance and memorability that Horse Girl was able to so effortlessly give. Baena’s latest (which is executive produced by the indie film dynamic duo, Mark and Jay Duplass) is good for a few laughs while watching, but it’s not the most memorable of trips to be had.