Cooke puts in an incredibly magnatic performance, the brutal honesty and perverse pragmatism of the character pair beautifully with her flat delivery and detached performance. She's almost like an observer to the story, floating through it untethered. The real trick though is that, as the film progresses, she becomes perhaps the most symptomatic and engaging. Taylor-Joy is well cast and has both a very grounded emotional engagement with the story as well as a disturbing other-worldliness. The two together have tactile chemistry, complicated and corrupt but getting at that something that feels so relevant but also so mercurial. Anton Yelchin appears in a great supporting turn, his last on celluloid, and provides a wonderful balance to the two leads portraying a low-level scuzzy drug dealer but with surprising pathetic nuance and an odd but compelling optimism. The cast is very small so the only other real character with any significance onscreen time is the stepfather, Sparks does well at playing an oblivious sleaze and has one great crackling scene with Lily where he spouts some truth.
Originally written as a(unproduced) play the transition to film is astonishingly well wrought. The liquid, lurking cinematography and the percussive almost Kabuki score are chillingly effective and display a skill and poise that makes this freshman offering from Cory Finley very very exciting.
The story is disarming. On the surface you'd think the film would have its work cut out for it making the story of two extremely affluent teens interesting but it paints a cutting and multifaceted portrait of privilege, ambition, and morality that is not only entertaining but culturally pertinent.
A pleasing and startling captivating in its surety.
Don't Miss It.
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