Rob Reiner turned it up to 11

On 14 December 2025, acclaimed Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their Los Angeles home. Their son, Nick Reiner, has since been charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

The rather macabre public reaction has expressed two things. First, a profound shock at the shattering of a family through such an intimate and unimaginable tragedy. Second, culture-war quibbling over Reiner’s outspoken anti-Trump stance and progressive activism. Apparently, the commentariat continue to be surprised that Hollywood liberals turn out to be, well, Hollywood liberals.

We must not allow these ghoulish talking points to be Reiner’s legacy. Instead, we ought to remember him for his extraordinary body of films – many of which are masterpieces so deeply embedded in the fabric of culture that they have become permanent fixtures.

The most striking thing about Reiner’s filmography is how apparently disparate it is. In the remarkable run of This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally… (1989), Misery (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992), there is no overarching genre or style. There is no signature ‘look’ to Reiner’s films – no weird camera angles, no precious visual tics, no directorial fragrance. There are very few authorial fingerprints that lend themselves to auteur-worship. Nevertheless, the films are so lodged in the public imagination that so much banter is just people quoting Reiner projects: ‘These go to 11’; ‘You can’t handle the truth!’; ‘I’ll have what she’s having’.

Reiner was the son of the actor, comedian, director and screenwriter, Carl Reiner. Carl himself was the friend and comedy partner of Mel Brooks. Carl and Mel met in 1950 as writers on Sid Caesar’s live New York show, Your Show of Shows, where they practiced building jokes like arguments under studio lights. From this formative environment it would seem inevitable that Rob would absorb the especially Jewish comedy sensibility of taking a premise, worrying it to death, then pushing it one notch past sensible. The comedy term for this is ‘the topper’ – the extra beat that milks the joke for its final, unexpected punchline that always leaves the audience roaring. Vaudeville, an entertainment form in which Jews played a major role, as well as the Jewish Catskills circuit, often ran on this technique of escalating humour. Rob Reiner applied this to Hollywood genres, again and again, to great success.

In what many would argue is Reiner’s masterpiece, the ‘rockumentary’, This Is Spinal Tap, the premise is not that rock stars are ridiculous but that rock stars take themselves absurdly seriously. Reiner pushes this seriousness to its logical end. If louder is better, then why not create an amplifier that ‘goes to 11’? And because Reiner is the master of toppers, he keeps going; Stonehenge becomes an incorrectly measured stage prop, which in turn becomes a complete humiliation with the addition of tiny dancing performers.

Stand by Me is a coming-of-age film that avoids the usual schmaltz. The premise of the coming-of-age genre is that adolescence is the death of innocence. Reiner makes that metaphor literal. Four boys hike out to find a corpse, padding the miles with bravado and filthy anecdotes. The topper is the vomit story. Shown on screen as a tale within the tale, a pie-eating contest escalates with insane teenage logic into a full-scale, chain reaction vomit apocalypse. Then the boys find Ray Brower, blue and ruined and utterly ordinary, and the film shuts up. No lesson, no consolation, just the hard fact that childhood ends when death stops being theoretical.

In The Princess Bride, Reiner took on the fairytale genre. While directors either play fairytales straight or mock them to death, Reiner perfected the genre, once again, through heightening it. Inigo Montoya does not merely want revenge, he rehearses it like a liturgy until it becomes a weapon. ‘Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya…’ is repeated so often it stops being exposition and becomes fate. Folk healer Miracle Max turns resurrection into an argument about definitions: ‘mostly dead’ versus ‘all dead’. This is pure Reiner, magic taken to the absurd extremes of semantics and petty grievance.

When Harry Met Sally… is the rom-com pushed to its most public, most indecorous. If men cannot tell when women are faking an orgasm, then the only honest demonstration is a performance in a crowded deli. Reiner stages it as a social detonation, then tops it with a line delivered by his own mother, the infamous ‘I’ll have what she’s having’.

Misery contains Reiner’s nastiest on-screen logical conclusion. His masterstroke was to take the thriller to the next level not with gore, but with psychological impact. In Stephen King’s source novel, Annie chops off Paul’s legs. In the film, she smashes his ankles with a sledgehammer. It’s not a clean break but rather a soundscape of smashed bones, something that lands far more viscerally. This was Reiner’s skill: on paper, a more cinematically acceptable scene; in reality, a devastating and enduring piece of cinema.

In A Few Good Men, the courtroom drama becomes a bar fight conducted in sentences. ‘You can’t handle the truth’ is the much-quoted eruption – but Reiner’s topper is Kaffee’s calm repetition of a single, blunt question until Jessup, out of sheer pride, blurts his confession.

In the later years, though, the heightening softened. North (1994) is often seen as Reiner’s first stumble after a hot streak. This was not entirely Reiner’s problem. It felt like a symptom of a broader Hollywood malaise setting in; a system increasingly averse to sharp edges, where turning films up to 11 was frowned upon unless they could be franchised.

Reiner did not merely make good films in every genre. He took each genre to its extreme – its most memorable. We will be quoting his toppers forever, because they cannot be improved. On a good day, if we are lucky, we can live our lives all the way up to 10. Reiner was the man who showed us how to take it to 11.

Alex Dale and Maren Thom are co-hosts of the Performance Anxiety podcast.