50
Lawson's wishy-washiness about tone doesn't prevent the actors from nailing the comic exchanges.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.
40
The New York Times by Daniel M. Gold
The only sketch that’s inspired is the final one.
38
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
Sex comedies work best with light touch, and as the ponderous title (a literal translation of the French term for orgasm) indicates, Australian writer-director Josh Lawson mostly doesn’t have it.
60
Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein
Alternately silly and provocative, strained and funny.
50
The actors are all game and well paired, but flashes of chemistry and an appreciable level of production finesse (courtesy of d.p. Simon Chapman and composer Michael Yezerski) aren’t enough to bring the requisite charge to this flimsy, pseudo-provocative material.
67
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
The Little Death never feels remotely of a piece, and is likely to find its proper audience months from now when the individual sketches show up on YouTube.
75
The film investigates a gallery of kinks, fetishes, oddball turn-ons, and pent up sexual repressions like somnophilia (sex with someone who is asleep), dacryphilia (tears and sobbing), unconventional role-playing, and worse. The results are sad and often laugh-out-loud funny.
50
A broad, goofy primer on the not-quite-cutting-edge of consensual adult sexuality.
50
Generally speaking, the more obscure the fetish, the worse the subplot gets, though they all wear out their one-joke welcome before Lawson inevitably turns up the sentiment and makes the film about love and kids and happy unions.