In last year’s perplexing and at times unsettling Welcome to Me, written by Eliot Laurence and directed by Shira Piven, Kristen Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a recent lottery-winning millionaire with borderline personality disorder who uses her newfound wealth to buy her way into her own autobiographical talk show. And it’s just as strange as it sounds.

You can call it a dramedy, but when you realize you’re mostly laughing at actions and tics that result from Alice’s mental illness, you start to feel pretty damn uncomfortable as a viewer. While Alice’s eccentricities continue to snowball throughout (her odd relationship with her therapist (Tim Robbins), her full-frontal walk through a busy casino floor), you aren’t really sure where the line between the drama and comedy is supposed to start/end because it’s so well blended together. At times you’ll laugh at the indie-comedy and at other times, your skin will feel like crawling off of you and hiding under the couch.

Either way, Wiig delivers by fully committing, like the movie itself, to the script and character at hand. On the fictional show’s first episode, Alice enters the screen riding a large swan float. She makes and eats a meatloaf cake…in real time. She publicly shames a woman who wronged her in high school. It’s Curb Your Enthusiasm-level cringe-worthiness, but the SNL vet remains steadfast throughout.

The film’s supporting cast shares many of the audience’s concerns, laughs and horror. James Marsden, Wes Bentley, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack all play characters working at the station, and all are right on the money. Linda Cardellini appears as Alice’s friend Gina, and as always, it’s fantastic to see her (did you watch Bloodline yet?).

Although Welcome to Me will almost definitely make you squirm, it’s quite an entertaining indie romp and you should see it – if only to see Wiig completely outside her element and navigating such tricky waters like mental illness. With this and other roles in movies like Girl Most Likely and The Skeleton Twins, Wiig is positioning herself as one of the more interesting post-SNL comedians of late. Though Girl was half-cooked, Skeleton was a powerful movie about two depressed and suicidal twins with a slew of problems who continue to fumble throughout their adults lives without ever figuring out the source of their discontent. Wiig (along with Bill Hader) really dissect two adults who have, in a way, failed at transitioning over to adulthood, and as a result, the twins seem to be harbingers of sorrow for each other, repeating past mistakes and continuing their own individual cycles of misfortune.

Sure, everyone loves Wiig’s nuttier, expected fare – it was no surprise that she showed up in Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp or that she’ll pop up in Zoolander 2 and Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot – but in these smaller, quirkier films, she’s proving that there’s far more to her than meets the eye. And I hope she keeps surprising us.

Grades:
Welcome to Me: B
The Skeleton Twins: A
Girl Most Likely: C+