Beige, good-looking boy meets New York media girl; girl falls for boy; something bumpy happens; the path of true love yada, yada; and then everything gets resolved in a tidy 90 minutes. So goes every rom-com of the early aughts, all nicely predictable, comfort viewing – except for Jennifer Aniston’s shocking Rumour Has It, streaming now on Tubi.

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Rumour is billed as a rom-com and while Aniston’s Sarah might tick plenty of the stereotypical boxes (she’s a journalist from the Big Apple flying back to her family’s decidedly Nancy Meyers-ish Cali home for her sister’s wedding) there Rumour departs from the usual script and verges off into the cuckoo.

Check out what people have said online and fans are genuinely united: Rumour is “the most creepy movie I’ve seen”, “Super uncomfortable to watch”, and “odd”.

America’s Sweetheart, is that you?

The plot hinges on a rumour that Aniston’s Sarah hears back in her hometown, that The Graduate is based on her family’s true story, meaning that her mother and her grandmother, played by a brilliant Shirley Maclain, slept with the same guy. Sarah realises that this lothario, played by Kevin Costner, might be her father and sets off to track him down. Phew! He’s not her Dad so…she sleeps with him. Oh and Sarah is actually engaged, an inconvenient fact she seems to forget for much of the movie.

Or as one viewer posted after watching it: “The fact that the main character sleeps with a man whom she had just an hour ago thought was her father is so weird. It felt like incest, even though it technically wasn’t.”

The bizarre thing is, Aniston, doing press at the time Rumour came out, in December 2005, said she thought the movie was “fun and light”. Erm, okay.

If the Friends’ star’s decision to do this movie is a head-scratcher, let’s cut her some slack: At that time, she was going through her own annus horribilis.

In January that year, the world had gasped in shock when Hollywood’s Greatest Marriage of All Time, Aniston’s union with Brad Pitt, came crashing down after he toddled off to film Mr and Mrs Smith and met one Angelina Jolie. Aniston filed for divorce in March 2005 and it was finalised in the lead up to Rumour’s release.

She later told Vanity Fair of the personal toll, “Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused? Yes. Do I have my days when I’ve thrown a little pity party for myself? Absolutely. But I’m also doing really well. I’m a tough cookie.”

Compounding the impact of her divorce was that it only stoked the tabloid obsession with her at a time when the paparazzi culture was nothing short of hideous when female stars especially were targeted and chased on a daily basis.

Only days before the Rumour premiere, Aniston was photographed topless sunbaking in her backyard by a photographer nearly 300 metres away using a very long lens, with the photos published in the US, Europe and the UK.

While promoting Rumour she said during an interview of the paps, “they’re horrendous and just so reckless”. To get shots of her, she said, “these men are driving on sidewalks, and cutting through intersections.”

The snappers, she said, “know how to be aggressive, scare the shit out of people and get the picture.”

And this was all coming after another break-up. In 2004, after ten years, Friends had drawn to a close, which was, she later told Vanity Fair, “really painful. It was a family…It was hard to have such a wonderful constant in your life, a place to go every day, and then all of a sudden it’s not there.”

Ironically, Rumour was shot on a sound stage nearly next door to where the sitcom had been filmed for a decade. An emotional Aniston told Dark Horizons that, filming Rumour, “When August rolled around and normally, I was ready to go back to Friends, I sat there for about a day and went, well, this is awkward”.

However one thing Aniston has proven is that, in all of this, she never lost her sense of humour. A few years later she joked about Rumour while accepting a film award. Taking to the podium she said that she’d noticed “a strange parallel between the movies I’m doing and my life off-screen,”

“It started with The Good Girl, then of course Rumour Has It, followed by Derailed. Then there was The Break Up. If any of you have a project entitled Everlasting Love with a Stable Adult Male, I’m at table 6!”

Rumor Has It is currently streaming on Tubi for free.