Movie Review: 'Adult Best Friends' is Warm, Funny, and Honest

Adult Best Friends

Directed by Delaney Buffett

Written by Delaney Buffett, Katie Corwin

Starring Delaney Buffett, Katie Corwin, Mason Gooding

Release Date February 28th, 2025

Published February 26th, 2025

Adult Best Friends stars Delaney Buffett and Katie Corwin as Delaney and Katie, childhood best friends who grew up together and are beginning to grow apart. While Katie is embracing the conventions of adulthood, including a long term relationship with John (Mason Gooding), Katie remains in young adulthood, drinking and partying and begging Katie to join her. As Katie would rather stay home with John and Katie wants only to go out and party, the two struggle to maintain their lifelong bond.

The plot kicks in when John proposes to Katie and she accepts. Now, Katie must find a way to tell her best friend that she’s getting married while worrying that Delaney’s disdain for John will cause an irreparable rift in their friendship. In order to break it to Delaney gently, Katie plans a beach vacation for them, returning to a beachside town where they’d vacationed and partied more than a few times. Delaney thinks it will be a weekend of drinking and partying, while Katie hopes they can find quiet moments for a heart to heart conversation.

From there, we watch as Katie’s efforts to tell Delaney about her engagement get interrupted in comic fashion. Then a bachelor party group meets the duo at a bar leading to more partying, drinking and a slight flirtation between Katie and the bachelor, Charlie, played by Connor Hines. It’s just a bit of flirty banter, but it is enough to distract Katie from telling Delaney about her engagement which will come out, though certainly not in the gentle, quiet way Katie had intended.

Adult Best Friends is a terrific comedy but where the film excels is in capturing how friendships evolve from childhood to adulthood. The desire to stay the same versus the necessity for growing up and adapting to new conditions in life, is a terrific space to explore characters, drama, and comedy. Delaney Buffett and Katie Corwin lay out the stakes of their story with ease and charm and the growing divide between Delaney and Katie is remarkably realistic while delivering genuine laughs.

Anyone who has tried to stay close with childhood friends will relate closely to Adult Best Friends. The dreams that you have in childhood about staying with your best friend forever is much harder than you imagine. As you get older, your circles change, new people enter your lives and making room for relationships and jobs, makes staying close difficult though not impossible. The struggle is real, especially if your friend marries someone you don't like, that can be a challenge you simply cannot overcome.

Delaney Buffett and Katie Corwin co-wrote the screenplay for Adult Best Friends and it should not surprise anyone to know that they’ve been friends for years and that the script is based on their experiences growing up, getting older, and trying to remain best friends. Delaney and Katie have an easy chemistry, lived in personas, and a general likability that makes the film easygoing and engaging.

That easygoing vibe slowly builds to a genuinely dramatic ending that had me tearing up, thinking of my own best friend from childhood, and feeling all of the mixed emotions that come with being happy for your friend, missing them, and the joy you can still find when you can be together. The final act of the film really got to me and took was a conventionally enjoyable comedy into something slightly more complicated and exceptional.

This film really hit my heart. My best friend from childhood is still one of my closest friends today. We met when we were 10 years old. We were inseparable. Then came college and jobs, and family. He moved away for work, I stayed close to home. We never talked about our friendship in specific terms. We’ve just always been there for each other, getting together when our schedules allow, sharing texts and phone calls. It has never been a question that we’d always be friends but I would not say that it was that simple.

Much like Delaney and Katie’s experience in Adult Best Friends, we don’t have the same interests that we did as kids. But that doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, it just means we’ve changed and while that can be scary, it doesn’t have to change everything. Adult Best Friends captures this feeling with warmth, humor and sensitivity. Any relationship can be strained or fraught, but the right relationships simply remain through it all. That’s how you know you care about someone, keeping that relationship strong matters to you both and you do the work.

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