Walking and Talking 2012

Amelia and Laura are childhood best friends who navigate the uneasy tides of adult life together, their bond tested as love, ambition, and envy begin to blur the lines between friendship and romance. Laura’s engagement to Frank should feel like a milestone, a steady future, but Amelia starts to feel vulnerable watching her friend settle down while her own love life wobbles. In the midst of this, Amelia finds herself drawn to Bill, the local clerk at the video rental store she visits. At first, his appearance and his obsession with sci-fi and horror films give Amelia pause, yet something in his quiet intensity and a shared curiosity about life’s strange corners draws her in. The moment they sleep together should have been a simple turning point, but it quickly becomes a tangle of longing and hurt. While Amelia is in the bathroom, Laura’s sharp, offhand question about her date—referencing it to “the ugly guy”—lands with a sting. The moment is a sharp reminder of how quickly a casual remark can wound, and Bill’s reaction when Amelia emerges reveals a fragile, complicated dynamic between them. He leaves, and the simple spark between Amelia and Bill feels suddenly fragile and uncertain.

Meanwhile, Laura—no longer just a fiancée but a therapist stepping into the weight of her choices—begins to fantasize about one of her patients. She also allows the flirtations of a waiter at a coffee shop to slip into her thoughts and starts to push back against the calm of her relationship by picking fights with Frank. The engagement that once promised security now feels like a stage on which Laura tests herself, her boundaries, and the limits of her marriage. This shift contributes to a growing sense that no one is fully immune to the patterns they’ve carried from their shared past.

Amelia, still smarting from her encounter with Bill who never quite calls back, finds herself orbiting him with an intensity that borders on obsession. She asks Andrew, a former partner, why they broke up, and his candid confession—that she placed too much importance on her boyfriends—lands with a quiet, painful honesty. After two weeks of mixed signals, Amelia musters the courage to confront Bill at the video store, only to learn that he is polite but distant, and that Laura’s message about the encounter has colored his view of her. The moment Bill chases her down and reveals what he heard about the call underscores a shared vulnerability: the fear that a single, careless remark can derail something genuine.

The trio—the two friends and Frank—retreat to Amelia’s parents’ country cottage, a place that should be about rest and renewal but instead becomes a pressure cooker for old wounds. Laura and Frank plan to get married, imagining a future built on trust; yet the evening erupts into a fierce fight in which Frank storms off in the middle of the night. Amelia begins to receive obscene, unsolicited phone calls, and in a bid to feel safe, she calls Andrew for support. When Andrew arrives and answers the phone, the calls stop, and a new night unfolds where drink loosens tongues and old relationships resurface. The two of them share stories of what has passed, drown the noise of the outside world, and drift into a moment of reckless confession as they go swimming together in the quiet dark.

Back in town, Laura and Frank attempt to salvage what they can by meeting for a dinner with the hope of reconciliation. A disturbing, intimate gift—Frank’s biopsied mole placed in a box—lands on the table as a test of how far they’re willing to go to mend what’s broken. Laura, unsettled by the present and the idea of their future, leaves the table without finding closure. The emotional terrain remains unsettled, and the possibility of healing feels distant.

Amelia’s own life threads back to Bill when she discovers he is dating his ex, a reminder that happiness can be elusive and that new connections can carry old baggage. She returns home, where Andrew arrives and descriptions of their past shift the conversation from casual to intimate. Andrew explains a distance that had grown between them, and in a shared moment of vulnerability he kisses Amelia and they sleep together. In a quiet, impulsive gesture, she hands him the black leather pants she once bought him as a Christmas gift, a symbol of a past gift that never quite found its moment to be worn.

Even as Frank remains physically present, the emotional gap for Laura persists. Yet the friendships endure in a way that suggests a resilience born of shared history. Laura, still intent on a wedding, houses her plans within the larger arc of their lives, and after a difficult exchange with Amelia following a failed makeup trial, the two women argue about whether their friendship has survived the strain. The truth surfaces: one has felt abandoned, while the other has learned to hold onto her own sense of future. Reconciliation arrives not as a grand gesture but as a quiet decision to listen, to forgive, and to reframe the bond that has guided them since childhood.

In the end, Laura makes amends with Frank, and their decision to move forward gains new, uncertain momentum. On the wedding day, Laura entrusts Amelia with the task of doing her makeup and hair, a gesture that signals a renewed, uncomplicated trust between them. Laura tells Amelia that she believes she and Andrew might truly make it, and the two walk toward the ceremony hand in hand, carrying the weight of what they’ve learned, the complicity of their shared past, and the cautious hope of a future built on honesty and connection.