Well-cast and acted with sympathic warmth and wit, “Making it Up” is an object lesson in the shortcomings of relying on voice-over narration to tell your story on screen.

It’s a dark, maddeningly-manic and almost cute dip into loving someone whose mental illness renders them toxic to be around. And writer-director Guillermo Calderón (“Neurda”) makes the infuriating decision to talk the damned thing to death with that anti-cinematic lazy screenwriter’s crutch, voice-over storytelling.

The story is about a friends/lovers triangle involving Ana (Paulina Gaitán), her childhood pal/recent-ex Alexandra (Ilse Carlos) and the friend Ana falls back on (Regina Blandón) whenever Alex melts down, lashes out, goes off her meds or on a bender.

Rita has a roomie, but takes in Ana when her makeup partner/life partner Alex melts down again. Free spirited, flat-broke Rita narrates our story, mostly a tale of makeup artists in a makeup-obsessed culture — weddings to parties to drag shows — whose customers are many and whose bills are always to be paid “mas tarde.”

Alex and Ana have had their latest split, but as Alex is “green-eyed,” aka “a whitey,” she has access to higher-end clients than the drag queens and other deadbeats Rita does, when she reaches out to Ana again, they’re not in a position to turn her down.

Rita flits around the wedding party, not doing her share of the mass making-up the job calls for, drinking and promising and lying and then declining to pay Ana and Rita their full fee when the job is done.

Alex is toxic, high-maintenance and exhausting. Alex, as we’ve seen in the opening scene, is in the fast lane headed towards a breakdown and a mental hospital.

“Making it Up” discusses — via the constant voice-over narration by Rita — the appeal or lack of appeal in marriage in modern Mexico among modern women, the “covering-up” that goes on in their world and their work and the endless “forgiveness” that goes on when you care about someone who can’t keep themselves from setting fire to this or that corner of your life.

Friends are betrayed, men are grasped at, used and abandoned. And Alexandra’s so casual about it all she can barely remember what this week’s grudge is or who she’s feuding with over it.

The “marriage” thing is introduced time and again in the voice-over, but only enters the narrative in the finale. The toxic relationship unfolds, scene after scene, on the screen. We don’t need that explained to us in voice-over, and despite that, it is.

The script leans on Rita’s myriad observations of the obvious, or inane bits of filling in the blanks.

“The rule is,” she says, in Spanish with English subtitles,” “if you don’t have money, call a friend who works in a club.”

There’s a better movie in this than Calderón’s final cut of “Making It Up” suggests. Cut two-thirds of the narration out and let the characters and the sensitive performances do the heavy lifting they’re so very qualified to do and I dare say we’d see that better movie. We’d certainly hear it.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Paulina Gaitán, Regina Blandón, Ilse Carlos, Tamara Vallarta, Fabrizio Santini and Emmanuel Varela.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillermo Calderón. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:21