Finally got around to watching Rich Flu on Hulu, and I ran to write this review in order to warn others to please, don’t waste your time.

The concept alone had me curious. A mysterious disease starts targeting the ultra wealthy and the only way to survive it is to give away your fortune. Basically capitalism as a body horror plot, and on paper it’s a fun premise for a satire. But all that potential was wasted on horrible execution.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Laura, a woman whose career peaks as a deadly virus targets the rich. As panic erupts and society turns on the 1%, she must fight to protect her family in a world where wealth becomes a death sentence. Now I know that sounds dumb, but I swear it had a good start. That fight to find a safe place for her family to settle really should have been the emotional backbone of the film. Instead the plot spends most of its runtime jumping around without bothering to explain its own rules. The “symptom” of the disease is supposedly glowing white teeth, which sounds like it should mean something, and by the end you’re still not sure if it does. There’s a whole subplot involving the main character’s mother that goes nowhere.

Not to mention, the film wants credit for asking ‘what if billionaires had to feel what everyone else feels,’ but it never actually centers the people whose hardship is supposedly the point. We spend the whole movie rooting for a wealthy woman trying to hold onto her family and her money, not for the people who’ve been living this reality the whole time. The one real chance the film had to add depth to that message was Yoleen, a migrant lost at sea. They give her a full backstory, then barely use her again unless she’s there to comfort or support the wealthy family in some way. You can’t build a movie around empathy for the underprivileged and then reduce the one underprivileged character with a backstory to emotional support for the rich people. It came off a bit tone deaf.

Online, the reception is split. Half the internet is calling it a smart, deliberately opaque allegory about how greed metastasizes even after wealth is stripped away, pointing to the ending, where Laura, who gave up everything, still can’t let go of one small material item, as proof the film is making a real point about how deep that mindset runs. The other half is calling it an incoherent mess with wooden dialogue and a scattered plot that loses its point halfway through.

I agree with the second half. A Reddit user joked that the movie missed an opportunity to just name itself “Affluenza,” and honestly, they might be onto something, that title alone would have leaned harder into satire and probably landed better than what we actually got.

Overall, a strong premise, a talented cast, and a finished product that left me more confused than provoked. Skip it, or at least go in not expecting much.