Annette Bening has joined Andy Samberg in 42.6 Years, a sci-fi romantic comedy about a man who gets cryogenically frozen for—you guessed it—42.6 years, then tries to reunite with his girlfriend. Who is now, naturally, decades older than him.
The film comes from director Michael Schwartz (The Peanut Butter Falcon) and writer Seth Reiss (The Menu), which is about as strong a creative pedigree as you can get for a high-concept rom-com. Schwartz knows how to balance quirky premise with genuine emotion. Reiss knows how to write smart, subversive comedy that doesn't forget to have a point.
And the premise is genuinely clever. According to Deadline, Samberg plays a man frozen in his 30s who wakes up to find his former girlfriend is now in her 70s. That's Bening, who at 68 can play the emotional complexity of someone confronting an impossible reunion.
This is part of a broader trend: age-gap rom-coms are back, but with a twist. Instead of the tired older-man-younger-woman dynamic that Hollywood has recycled for decades, we're seeing films use sci-fi conceits to explore unconventional pairings. The Time Traveler's Wife did it with time travel. About Time did it with magical realism. Now 42.6 Years does it with cryogenics.
The brilliance is that the sci-fi premise becomes the excuse to tell a story that would be impossible otherwise. You can't naturally have a 30-something man fall in love with a 70-something woman without it being contrived or problematic. But if he was her boyfriend 42 years ago, and he's been frozen ever since? Now you have a story about love, time, loss, and what it means when people age at different rates.
