Most of us still cringe when we hear the phrase “COVID movie,” not because it’s “too soon,” but because seemingly every angle of the pandemic, of lockdown, of vaccine paranoia has already been dramatized. We’ve had dramas about how social isolation is bad, thrillers about lockdown home invasion, horror movies about the next transmittable contagion beyond our dimension. After four years we’ve kind of covered it, and, frankly, it’s not a subject that many people necessarily want to keep revisiting. Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, on the other hand, manages to be a COVID movie without being a “COVID movie,” using the pandemic as mere backdrop for a slyly hilarious comedy about life on pause.

It’s the early months of lockdown in New York, an anxious time for the residents of what was then an epicenter for disease transmission. Still, everyone has other shit to deal with. Exasperated Terry Goon (Hammel’s frequent collaborator John........

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