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Significant Other helmers on why the sci-fi thriller is the 'best anti-date movie'

When audiences sit down to watch Significant Other they should maybe think twice before doing it with their, well, significant other.

Dan Berk, who wrote and directed the film (streaming on Paramount+ Friday) with frequent collaborator Robert Olsen, jokes that they call the film "the best anti-date movie possible."

"We do like to sometimes call it [that] because there's definitely a lot of people that are going to be watching it in the audience tonight, and at home starting tomorrow, that are in a relationship — at a certain point in their relationship — that while the movie's playing, they're gonna be [side-eyeing their partner]," he says in EW's New York Comic Con studio, joined by Olsen and stars Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy.

Maika Monroe and Jack Lacy in "Significant Other," a Paramount+ original movie and Paramount Players Production. Photo credit: Paramount +
Maika Monroe and Jack Lacy in "Significant Other," a Paramount+ original movie and Paramount Players Production. Photo credit: Paramount +

Paramount + Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy in 'Significant Other'

Monroe and Lacy play a couple in the film, who decide to take a remote backpacking trip through the Pacific Northwest, but a series of disturbing events makes them realize that not everything is as it seems.

Olsen, who admits that he hates watching any trailers for films he plans to see, says that's about all he's willing to share about the film. "It's always the less you know the better. There's a lot of movies out there that you don't want to know," he says, citing recent horror film Barbarian as an example. "When you tell someone to go see that, you're like, 'You don't want to know anything about it, just go see it.' And so we try to have it be as much that as possible."

Adds Berk, "Enough press has entered the discourse that some of the genre cues we're playing with aren't necessarily a secret, but you can say to someone it's like a romantic drama wrapped in a sci-fi thriller sprinkled with horror with a little comedy glaze on it."

For more on Significant Other — including what drew Monroe and Lacy to the project, what it was like filming entirely in the woods, and more — watch the full interview in the video above.

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