Director: William Oldroyd
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Anne Hathaway
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I probably went into the day of the screening a little bit more during my review of Don’t Change Your Husband (1919). A perfect movie day, even if the movies themselves were not my favorite.
Did I Like It: I’ve been watching a lot of noir lately, and the rhythms become all too comfortable. That also probably puts me probably in the wrong headspace for any film that trucks in a lot of the noir tropes, but then tries to subvert them.
I’m on board with nearly every element of this film. Hathaway slithers through the film with barely contained chaotic energy. She doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her ability to vamp through a movie, largely because she’s only been really allowed to flex that muscle in forgettable or mildly disappointing movies like The Witches (2020) or The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Her chemistry with McKenzie is electric, then sexy, then a perfect synthesis of unsettling and revolting. It’s very nearly a perfect amalgamation of all the elements that made those noir films so great, but with the added feature of not being weighed down by the Hays Code, allowing the film to be unrelentingly unflinching.
But some of the fun of movies like these is the palpable tension that comes with the world closing in on the main character who have wandered off the straight and narrow path. Here, though, the movie doesn’t so much concludes as it just stops. One might be able to make the argument that the movie isn’t about the escalating ring of murder surrounding the characters, but more about Eileen’s (McKenzie) shedding the elements of her life that are holding her back*, but it also leaves the entire affair a little unbelievable. There’s no way this girl doesn’t get picked up for murder before she gets past the Massachusetts border.
*A quick scan of a summary of the source material indicates it doubles down on that notion, which may ironically enough make this film better than the novel upon which it is based.