I have a habit of going to films I expect to be bad. It is cheaper than a comedy club and you get popcorn. My wife humours this, mostly. So when something I had quietly written off turned out to be good, I had nowhere to put the feeling. You can't smugly enjoy being wrong on the way home if you spent the queue announcing it would be rubbish.
It was the kind of premise that reads like a focus group decided it. I'd seen the trailer twice and groaned both times. Then about twenty minutes in I realised I had stopped composing the witty things I was going to say afterwards and was just watching, which is the highest praise I can give anything. The plot did the obvious thing for a while and then quietly didn't, in a way that felt earned rather than clever.
I won't spoil it, partly out of decency and partly because the bits that landed were small. A look held a beat too long. A line that could have been a speech and was instead four words. It trusted me to keep up, and being trusted by a film is rarer than it should be.
So: I was wrong, and pleasantly. The lesson, which I will absolutely fail to apply next time, is that low expectations are the best seat in the house. You can only be disappointed or delighted, and delighted is a lovely way to end a Sunday.