What makes it different from others?

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

What Happened Was is a movie of creepy intensity that is both affecting and disturbing. Talented writer/director/actor Tom Noonan allows the viewer to be a fly on the wall for a first date that starts off awkward and painful and then veers into the uncomfortably intimate. Michael and Jackie could be anyone you work with, pass every day in the hall, and never realize what's going on in their strange inner worlds. Lonely and simultaneously starved for meaningful human companionship and afraid of it, by the end of the date Michael and Jackie reveal themselves in ways that are real and fascinating while also being scary in a way that few movies are. A must see for anyone interested in the dark recesses of the human mind.

***SPOILERS*** " What Happened Was" is a story about hurt and loneliness in the big city and how it effects two people Michael & Jackie Tom Noonan & Karen Sillas, who are co-workers at a big NYC law firm.Michael is a paralegal and Jackie is an executive assistant as they both spend what at first seems to be a quite evening dinner at Jackie's apartment that leads to an emotional explosion which exposes the mask that they've been wearing at their job all these years. Jackie really likes Michael very much and finds in him the reason for her to get up every morning and go to work. Single like Michael she as well as him want to have a relationship to put a wedge between the loneliness that they both feel but living as they do in a major modern metropolis in a way forces them not to be themselves. Michael is far more deluded then Jackie, who's more down to earth and honest about herself, in him thinking that he's a big time social activist who's writing a book, that he tells Jackie took him fifteen years to write, about the law profession and how it hurts those that it deals with. Michael in fact is really a very insecure young man afraid of facing life and thus losing himself in a fantasy world that he created for himself inside his living room watching TV shows mostly on the Discovery Channel. It comes as a great shock to Michael's ego when Jackie shows him a children book that she wrote that was published unlike his imaginary work on social injustice. Throughout the entire film Jackie does what she can to loosen Michael up, with almost an entire bottle of wine, and in the end he does seem to come out of his shell and really starts to get it on with Jackie. Still his insecurity keeps him from really being responsive to her feelings about him and it's that reaction that leaves Jackie in tears as she feels she made a fool of herself trying to get Michael to fall in love with her like she's with him. Michael is finally brought down to earth when he realizes how he hurt Jackie with his overwhelming sense of self-importance. Michael's clumsy attempt to make things right after he tried to leave her just as Jackie thought he would stay over night left her with a sense of outraged. It's then that she tells Michael just what she thought of him, this after how she felt all this time about him, and how he was the only person to make her happy in the office that they both worked at. That revelation by Jackie hit Michael so hard that for once he opens up to her and is honest about himself, not at first realizing her feelings that she had for him, and tries to make amends for what he, unconsciously, put her through that evening. Heart-felt and moving film about how people have trouble connecting with each other and how two people who worked and were friends for years at the job together are like fish out of water and strangers when they meet and try to start up a serious relationship out of the workplace.

This man is so odd. He was very good in this movie. I was surprised how well he did on this strange first "date". For the most part, the entire movie was shot in some NYC apartment and it was just about these TWO characters talking to eachother in a very awkward and uncomfortable manner. The female lead in this movie was HOT and I could not believe she was attracted to the bizarre looking Tom Noonan!!! Great movie though....for me.

An astonishing, captivating film. One of the toughest tricks to pull off is making film people talk like real people; director/writer Noonan does it o.k. This film generates a prickling, enjoyable sense of unease in the viewer, which gives way to discomfort and then alarm; and then on to awkwardness and the hope for reconciliation.The only other Noonan film I've seen, apart from his cameo in the enjoyable hokum `Heat,' is `The Wife,' which I feel is less successful. One of the small cast of that film is Wallace Shawm, star of `My Dinner with Andre,' which has been mentioned her by another reviewer. As he says, `What Happened Was' is on similar territory to `Andre,' but it's much more somber and doesn't give that `redeeming' feeling at its end. Demanding and rewarding.