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Sudden Manhattan (1996), Adrienne Shelly’s feature filmmaking debut, takes place in a dazed whirl. It starts about a week after Donna (Adrienne Shelly), a 25-ish New Yorker, has gotten fired from her assistant job at a local art museum. To get an idea of how she’s feeling now, take a look inside her diary: in it you’ll find an ever-expanding manifesto of self-doubt and defeatedness. “I have no job, no lover, and no passion for anything,” she affirms to herself. She’s at the point where she thinks washing her hair and face don’t really matter. And she’s firming up on the idea that there isn’t any use trying to cull meaning out of life because all it is, when all is said and done, is a series of random events, accidents, and delusions. This is all to say that she’s doing great. 

As she wobbles at the edge of a breaking point over an omelet at a diner by her apartment one morning, Donna notices a strange rumbling noise nobody else can hear. Then, when she steps out onto the street, she’s pretty sure she sees a man get shot to death in the middle of the road — to which a nearby police officer scoffs “no, you didn’t” when Donna screeches that she just saw a murder. (A little while later, she’s positive she sees the same guy gun someone else down.) Donna waffles between thinking she’s truly witnessed something terrible and that this is just new proof that she’s lost it. Not unreasonably, she believes more in the second thing. 

Sudden Manhattan isn’t exactly the wrong-place-wrong-time Hitchcockian thriller it sounds like it could be on paper. It’s more a quarter-life-crisis black comedy that coincidentally includes a murder element that is, if anything, less a driver of suspense and more another factor convincing Donna her life is falling apart. Other agents of on-edginess include a cute but pathologically lying actor played by Tim Guinee, who becomes a love interest nonetheless, and an NYU professor portrayed by Roger Rees so smitten with an uninterested Donna that he leaves flowers by her door constantly and sometimes waits outside so that he can remind her how much he loves her.

Comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s purgatorial After Hours (1985) are certainly warranted here. Shelly pulls off a similar kind of absurdist realism, where death feels around the corner and the supporting characters skew toward the grotesque. But her film is a few shades brighter (you never wonder whether the lead has involuntarily wandered into hell) and is more trained on its protagonist’s perceptions of the world than what is purely *happening* to them to spin their lives into chaos. 

The assortment of daffy characters and the sorta-kinda thriller stuff could in lesser hands be engines of forced, increasingly grating quirkiness. But Shelly has a good grip on her character and effectively translates her tripping-over-itself headspace. She’s a stellar comic actress to boot, swinging from joking-to-keep-from-crying deadpan to broader hysteria without ever accidentally misshaping the character’s core in the process. Shelly’s clear view of Donna is helpful in other ways. It makes the strangeness incessantly pinballing off her hit us more like a casting back of the “only in New York” expression than a reaching kind of weirdness. Shelly’s deft melding of tones and modes is thrilling to watch — you never doubt her vision — and it has a new poignancy some 25 years later, given the late filmmaker wasn’t able to fully explore the writing and directing she proved she had more than a knack for on the first real try. 

The only dent is the moderately cluttered finale, with its succession of too-quickly-introduced characters and slightly strained attempts at farce. But even that’s barely a problem. Sudden Manhattan is otherwise one of the best elucidations of being in your mid-20s and thinking everything is hopeless — including yourself — I’ve seen in a long time.