Married Couple Debuts Rom-Com 'All That She Wants' at TIFF — SkimNews
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- "All That She Wants" premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in early September, directed by married couple Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer and starring Annie Murphy and Cooper Raiff
- The film follows Emma, a dancer in her 30s who wants a baby but maybe not a relationship, until a younger grad student (Raiff) enters the picture; Bermingham said the script spoke to everything she was going through
- Bermingham and Rhymer spent four years securing financing, with their personal lives mirroring the story — Bermingham was pregnant with their first child when they came aboard, and their second son was born a week after they turned in the director's cut
- The premiere served as a homecoming, as much of the film was shot in Toronto; the project marks the couple's first feature as a co-directing team
- Bermingham said rom-coms have overcorrected toward protagonists who are either "a total mess" or "a super type A careerist," making a character who simply wants to start a family a rarity she hopes the film validates
- Murphy (known for "Schitt's Creek") and Raiff (known for "Cha Cha Real Smooth") both get to stretch — Murphy into emotional territory and Raiff into a more mature register than his usual neurotic roles
- The couple are developing an adaptation of "The Paper Bag Princess" for Universal and LuckyChap and "Big Time Abroad", picked up by New Line and billed as a cross between "Booksmart" and "Indiana Jones"
Why it matters: Bermingham argues the rom-com genre has overcorrected away from protagonists who simply want to start a family, leaving motherhood-desire narratives underserved — a gap 'All That She Wants' is explicitly designed to fill. With TIFF as a launchpad and upcoming projects already set up at Universal and New Line, the married-directing-duo model is yielding both commercial validation and a distinctive tonal lane for the filmmakers.
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