REVIEW: On a String [2026]

Rating: R | Runtime: 78 minutes
Release Date: September 11th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Joke Zero
Director(s): Isabel Hagen
Writer(s): Isabel Hagen

I can’t even get it in your dreams!

Juilliard-trained violist Isabel Hagen’s decade-plus of freelancing across New York City for weddings, parties, sessions, and intimate celebratory moments becomes excellent comedic fodder for her debut feature film On a String. From an opening scene of her awkwardly playing while her client’s engagement to his girlfriend implodes to an unforgettable gig for a “patron of the arts” that sees her quartet fleeing from the scene, truth is always wilder than fiction.

It’s an assured debut that shows Hagen’s handle on the jokes as well as the emotions inherent to them. One could reductively describe the film as a series of skits stitched together, but it all feels natural thanks to her character’s consistent uneasiness within each situation. Nothing is out-of-place because everything is equally absurd. And every unique scenario is born from a prior one. It allows for a solid through line that can then support the one-off gags.

That main thread is built around Isabel’s decision to audition for an opening at the Philharmonic despite everyone who knows her best (real-life brother Oliver Hagen as fictional brother Owen and Ling Ling Huang as her BFF and quartet counterpart Christina) knowing she’s never aspired to be in an orchestra. This choice infers upon everything due to the strain it places on her wrist and anxiety—two ailments that ultimately bleed into the other parts of her life.

There’s her family and the laughs inherent to a robotically serious brother and supportive parents (Dylan Baker and Karen Blood). Her quartet and the devolving sense of chill that arises from Isabel and Christina treating the other two (DeLaney Harter Rosenthal and Jacob Yates) like afterthoughts. Her crush Dave (John Kroner) and his inability to see her as an entity outside of his own needs. And her young student’s parents (Frederick Weller and Jamie Lee).

You can add a cameo from Eric Bogosian as an overzealous film director micro-managing the score Isabel has been hired to help perform along with many other seemingly random figures who help heighten the chaotic nature inherent to accepting work from strangers (including Charlotte Ray Rosenberg’s very funny Vybe), but those close relationships are what linger since she can’t simply walk away knowing she’ll never see them again.

Weller and Lee are the standouts from that category thanks to a nuanced dynamic that carries as much potential for the former to make an adulterous move as it does for the couple to solicit her together. They aren’t the only case of a people whose motives are hidden to create tension, comedy, and disappointment (Dave and Christina toe that line too), but they’re the most unpredictable since they enter Isabel’s life transactionally.

The protagonist is therefore put through a gauntlet of all the worst experiences someone in her position can endure in a very short timespan. Some can be laughed off and never thought about again. Some leave lingering guilt that must be acknowledged if not solved. And all the while Isabel is trying to figure out how to exist in a world that simultaneously demands and dismisses her talent—one that took thousands of hours to master at the expense of living.

Look no further than Hagen herself. All that time spent getting proficient at playing the viola only to get burned out and pivot to stand-up before now merging the two talents into a feature film and comedy special (Isabel Hagen at the Bitter End). Sometimes you do things because you love them and sometimes you stop loving them because they’re all you do. Unless you’re Oliver answering the question “Do you love music?” with “I choose to excel in it.”

There’s a definite lived-in authenticity that’s a testament to Hagen having the chops to bring it to life on both sides of the camera. An obvious comparison is early mumblecore Greta Gerwig and that messy quality of not knowing what you don’t know mixed with the confidence to take control when you do. This character is driven by as much vulnerable jealousy as self-assuredness to create a believable person doing her best to survive the universal unknown.

Isabel Hagen and Dylan Baker in ON A STRING; courtesy of Joke Zero.