Thoroughbreds Movie Review
Thoroughbreds is a cold film. There is not a person in it we can relate to, or feel affection for. It ostensibly concerns itself with the premise of suspense most famously enshrined in Hitchcockās classic Strangers on a Train: two otherwise normal people plotting murder. Amanda and Lily, though, are not ordinary, and it isnāt because they are rich. It is because they are psychopaths.
No, the film never says this, but Iām a big fan of the old saying about things that quack like ducks, and Amanda (Olivia Cooke) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) act like psychopaths. They ostensibly want to murder Lilyās stepfather Mark (Paul Sparks) because he is horrible. The terrible sins he commits---being snobbish, having a slight temper, sending Lily to a school she doesnāt want to go to---could only ever seem heinous to someone who is used to getting all of their way. Amanda admits from the very beginning of the film she has no feelings of any kind, for anyone or anything, ever, except perhaps her horse; she is facing an animal cruelty charge for attempting to put the crippled beast out of its misery but botching it. She is blunt. Lily is more academic, or at least she appears that way. In reality, she cares only about herself. She charges Amandaās mother for tutoring (without telling Amanda), she is disdainful toward a mother (Francie Swift) she claims to care for, and she is convinced to contemplate murder over practically nothing. For this, they hire a drug dealer and sex offender (Anton Yelchin, in his second-to-last film role). He plays tough but isnāt, really. Heās the only character in the movie that seems to have some human complexity.
The film is aggressively, completely, relentlessly bleak. I donāt feel it can really be compared to Hitchcock, because even his darkest films had good people in them, and the best anyone manages in this one is āonly marginally terribleā. The lack of even somewhat good people precludes us feeling anything for them. My job, however, is not to judge what first time writer-director Cory Finley wanted to do, but whether it is done effectively. The answer isā¦somewhat. It reaches its highest marks when the deep shadows recede just long enough for some mordant humor. Amanda teaches Lily to fake cry, and she is a natural at it, foretelling her real personality. The sheer complacency with which Amanda describes her horseās excruciating death is somehow the right level of uncomfortable for the material. Yelchin is in all the best scenes, including the filmās very highest point, when he is plotting the murder with the girls and ends up in a bathtub with a head wound. At times like these, Finleyās intent pokes through the removed haze the film adopts around itself.
At other times it is just too much. The giant chess board, the booming, intrusive score, the ominous-but-ultimately pointless shots of dark hallways and the forced comparisons with an older film on a television mark the script as trying to be too cute about itself. Cooke, Taylor-Joy and Yelchin give, to their credit, a combined acting effort that sometimes keeps us interested even when the characters they are embodying go off the rails. Taylor-Joy had her big breakthrough with 2016ās The Witch, where she was able to embody fragility, power and a lot of subtle commentary on a womanās role, or lack thereof, in society. She plays completely cold well here, yet in the end there are no layers to her character. The whole thing caps itself off with a brilliantly, darkly funny ending, and I found myself thinking that if everything before that had been up to such a standard, weād have a great little dark thriller on our hands.
Note: I donāt use stars, but here are my possible verdicts. I suppose you could consider each one as adding a star.
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