Thoroughbreds (amazon • iTunes) is sort of Discount Heathers, with a girl playing the disaffected provocateur role, and a lower body count, plus an ending that doesn’t quite hold together as tightly as its obvious inspiration. Even with some of its flaws, however, it’s so tightly written and features two riveting performances by its leads that it’s worth seeing even if you, like me, have fond memories of the 1988 darkly comic original.
Thoroughbreds starts out with the two teenaged protagonists reuniting after several years apart, meeting as Andover student Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) begins to tutor the peculiar Amanda (Olivia Cooke), the latter of whom has apparently just killed her horse. Amanda has exceptional perception and quickly sees through Lily’s pretenses, while also confessing to extreme emotional detachment: Amanda is anhedonic and perhaps antisocial, feeling nothing whatsoever and showing it in her perpetually neutral expressions. Her gaze and her tone are both disarming, which leads to the first of many funny scenes when Lily finally cops to the fact that Amanda freaks her out.
The plot kicks into gear shortly afterwards when Amanda suggests to Lily that she kill her controlling and vaguely creepy stepfather, Mark, who is very wealthy and berates Lily’s ineffectual mother. (Although I thought the film implied early in the script that Mark was at the least leering at Lily, if not actually attempting to abuse her, that turned out to be wrong, and Mark is just an asshole, but not a criminal.) Lily is aghast at the idea, until she sees Mark verbally abuse her mother again and finds out he’s decided to send her to a different boarding school, after which she tells Amanda she wants to go through with it. They plan to use a lowlife drug dealer, Tim (Anton Yelchin in what I think ended up his last film role), as hitman, although his willingness and his competence are both open questions. As the plan progresses, it turns out that Lily isn’t quite the delicate flower – or lily-white princess – she appears to be.
Cory Finley made his debut as both director and screenwriter with Thoroughbreds, crafting those two compelling characters and working in plenty of very dark humor, although he seemed unsure of how to stick the landing, and the film wobbles as a result before more or less staying on its feet. Amanda’s motivation at the climax is unclear or just hard to accept, and the brief coda doesn’t add anything to the story; ending the film in the final shot with Lily and Amanda together would have been more effective. There are also some extremely strong and unsettling shots of the girls’ faces that add to the noir-ish feel of the film without interrupting its flow. It’s a very auspicious first effort for Finley, however, marking him as a filmmaker to watch, as well as a star turn for Cooke.
The Other Side of Hope.
Note: I’m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I’m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.
I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel’s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I’m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven’t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I’ve ever seen. And that’s before we even talk about the sushi scene.
The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikström and Khaled Ali don’t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikström is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled’s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikström’s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.
The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can’t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn’t do anything. It’s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn’t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurismäki, who also directed 2011’s Le Havre has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn’t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikström plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.
Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikström attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled’s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikström, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.