Synopsis
On Halloween night, two couples prepare to attend an annual costume party. Lauren and Phil run their own photography studio, and while Lauren is a frustrated artist struggling beneath the demands of a mortgage and two kids, Phil is perfectly happy photographing an unending series of screaming two-year-olds and taking his kids out for ice cream after a soccer game. Ridley and Claire are an idyllically happy couple with two kids of their own. Ridley is a well-respected surgeon and Claire is a stay at home mom whose innermost thoughts sometimes roam far away from domestic serenity.
In the midst of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, Lauren brings out a primitive-looking bottle of blue wine that she picked up in Peru. Why is the wine blue? Because it is brewed from the skin of blue dart tree frogs and is a very special ceremonial wine for one particular Peruvian tribe. When a man and woman wish to marry, they must drink this wine and then spend the night together, before they get married. The next morning, if they still wish to get married, then they have the blessing of the tribe. If not, then no harm done and they each go their own way.
The key is the wine, which acts as a kind of truth serum. As the Latin expression goes, “in vino veritas” (there is truth in wine). Phil, Lauren and Claire drink the wine, reasonably sure that it’s merely the placebo effect that makes the natives think it has any truth-telling properties. Ridley, the doctor, declines to drink because he is on call. And so, the truths start to come out, slowly and amusingly at first, but then the truths become darker and more disturbing, not merely personal idiosyncrasies and secrets, but the kind of primal truths that we keep hidden and that spring from our deepest fears and wildest hopes.
The question becomes, what effect will these truths have on their friendship and on their relationships with one another? Could you stand to live with someone if you knew the complete, unvarnished truth about that person? And on the other hand, could anyone stand to live with you if they knew your innermost thoughts? What becomes clear as the film proceeds is that while some people need the truth to be happy, others need to avoid it as much as possible.
So it is that more than one mask is dropped on this eventful Halloween evening, and more than one relationship is changed forever. For the better? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. But at the very least, after one of the characters delivers a heartfelt soliloquy, you will never again think of Winnie the Pooh in quite the same way.
