Hannah Einbinder and Justin Theroux Crack Open Their Hearts in Wonderfully Acted and Hilarious Road Trip

The longest relationships of our lives, asserts novelist Kayla Bachman (Hannah Einbinder), are with our siblings. A strange tether ties together people, close in age, simply because they share DNA, even if there isn’t much else held in common. It’s a feeling any sibling might understand, regardless of how they feel about the people they’re related to, which means that if one’s life is in danger, it can feel like yours is, too.

Victoria Strouse’s directorial debut, Seekers of Infinite Love, is a tenderly observed family comedy-drama that lovingly examines lines of communication. Through four siblings, the writer-director examines how preternatural modes of thinking, ingrained familial dynamics and assumed biases all coalesce to color the way we speak to one another. It’s difficult to undo ingrained habits, especially when they are forced upon us by parents and those that came before us.

Seekers of Infinite Love Helps Us Question Our Dogmatic Beliefs About Success, Happiness and Communication

For Kayla, the system that holds her back gets naturally filtered through her writing, but that artistic outlet is more elusive for her three siblings. Her older brother, Zach (John Reynolds), is a roboticized lawyer who has only made an art out of tamping down his emotions, silently resenting the others for their relative freedom. Her younger brother, Wes (Griffin Gluck) could be a talented graphic novelist, but he’s too addicted to gambling and pills for us to know for sure. Her sister, Scarlett (Justine Lupe)… well, her sister Scarlett is a “mystery.”

For whatever level of healthy artistic output Kayla might have, however, she is riddled with anxiety, claustrophobia, and severe impulse control problems. Even though Zach has asked them all to a family meeting at his office on the 34th floor, she insists on taking the stairs. Forget about flying, she can’t handle an elevator.

Communication between the siblings is quickly established as stilted, to put it mildly. Kayla has more or less avoided speaking to Scarlett for three days because she knows it’s going to be a “big” conversation, which probably just a word she uses for anything beneath the surface. But that decision might have severe conequences, since the family has gotten word that Scarlett has decamped from New York City to join a cult in Kentucky called Seekers of Infinite Love, which is led by the mysterious Hal (Greg Kinnear).

To aid the situation, the parents have hired a professional de-prorammer by the name of Rick Dumont (Justin Theroux), a charming, if distinctly strange, renegade with a fondness for sage and platitudinal speech-making. The group first tries to board a flight, but Kayla’s panic attack – brough about in large part because Wes gave her adderall instead of klonopin – forces the mismatched foursome into a Hona minivan. Road trip it is.

Strouse’s familiar set-up, somewhat in the vein of previous indie darlings like Little Miss Sunshine, allows Strouse to cleanly dissect preconceived notions about what constitutes “proper” dialogue, and, more broadly, who gets to determine what constitutes massively tenuous ideas like happiness and health. It’s not hard to understand how Scarlett, a child of a family that resents emotional vulnerability, gets seduced by a cult of personality that fetishizes openness, community and shared space, even if its abundantly clear that Hal is preying upon his vulnerable acolytes for sex, money and ego.

Einbinder turns in a magnificently dialed-in, heart-forward and honest performance.

Things get kicked into overdrive for the family’s rescue plans when they hear that the cult is planning a mass suicide (in order to reach a higher plane called “The Vessel”) timed with the equinox. It’s obvious that they have to save Scarlett from herself, but an early question from Wes, asking if what they’re doing is right if she seems of sound mind and is happy to do so, lingers over the proceedings. Strouse isn’t making apologia for predators or the types of cults that dominate the Netflix documentary landscape, but does see them as an opportunity to question why each of us, in all of our hubris, think that our particularly way of thinking or being is inherently superior to others.

None of this would work if Strouse didn’t have scores of beautiful performances to aid her. Einbinder, who is about to enter into the last season of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy award, turns in a magnificently dialed-in, heart-forward and honest performance. Theroux has rarely been this funny and he somehow makes what could be a cartoonish character feel believable and sympathetic. Reynolds and Gluck equally bring forth gravitas to two roles which are tricky for any actor in that neither character is particularly open with who they are, nor where they want to go. And yet their lives feel written all over their faces. It’s one of the best ensemble performances of the SXSW festival.

It may be that the ironic joke of the film’s title is that the “Seekers” are not just the cult members, but all of us. What else is there in life than the search to be loved, and the search for peple to love? Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we are given people who we naturally connect to. Other times we have to work to make those connections work. What Strouse suggests is that neither is inherently better than the other. As long as we seek it, it exists. It’s there for all of us to find.

Seekers of Infinite Love screened at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.