Anya Taylor-Joy has one of
the most unsettling stares any actress ever possesses. You just don’t know what
she’s thinking. It was clear in her breakout role in what of the most
horrifying movies in the 2010s The Witch when you just couldn’t tell if
what you were seeing was supernatural – until the last lines. I’m pretty
certain it was one of the main reasons that so many people (myself included) were
drawn into the Emmy-winning The Queen’s Gambit (where Taylor-Joy took
every prize but the Emmy). There was a lot of subtle eroticism is Taylor-Joy’s
work - no mean feat in a limited series
entirely about chess – but one of the reasons I loved it so much was that look
on her face she got where you never knew what she was thinking at any time. She’s
already one of the most impressive actresses working today and she’s only 26.
I mention all of this
because I’ve been watching and rewatching over the past several months one of
her earliest films Thoroughbreds, and it wasn’t until the sixth or
seventh time that it finally registered that Taylor-Joy was in it. I say
this because even though her performance is a master class, my attention was
always drawn to her co-lead Olivia Cooke.
Cooke, like Taylor-Joy, is
another actress who started young and has had many brilliant roles. In Bates
Motel, where so much of the action was dominated by the extraordinary work
of Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga, Cooke often dominated the screen as Emma,
a classmate of Norman’s who spent her life tied to an oxygen tank. Every time
you saw her, you thought it was a matter of time before she ended up one of Norman’s
victims, and I’m still stunned she survived until the end of the series. She has
played Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair; she’s already worked with Spielberg
and she has a critical role on House
of the Dragon. None of that prepares you for her work as Amanda in Thoroughbreds.
The movie is short (little
more than an hour and a half long) and very concise. Writer-director Cory
Finley conceived at as a play, and there are few non-stage to screen adaptations
that you could see working as one. The movie takes place almost entirely in a Connecticut
mansion owned by the family of Lily, a teenage girl in an upper class boarding school.
Much of the time the camera follows the
actors around the mansion in a way you just don’t notice happen in any other film
but seems necessary rather than showy. The movie itself is divided into four ‘chapters’
and an epilogue, which give it the feel of a traditional Shakespearean play,
even though it would be closer to a comedy than any tragedy he would right. And
aside from the two female leads, there are very few other characters in the
film, and even fewer that register.
Lily and Amanda were
friends when they were children. We first meet Amanda when she comes to Lily’s
home and the camera follows her around the mansion as she waits for Lily to
show up. At one point, Amanda is examining a sword on the wall when Lily
finally arrives. Amanda has ostensibly come for SAT tutoring. It’s not more
than five minutes into the movie when we realize there’s more to it than that
because Amanda is fine telling us.
Amanda, as we will learn,
has been in an institution for animal cruelty. Her family had a horse, it broke
its leg and she killed it – not humanely. Amanda tells Lilly in a way that is
unsettling to everybody but to her is normal that she doesn’t feel anything.
Not said, not pain, nothing. Her
psychiatrist is running out of ideas. Her mother has fundamentally asked for
this tutoring session to get her daughter out of the house. “She’s paying for a
play date,” she says.
I don’t know if there’s
ever been a character quite like Amanda in film or television. Dexter Morgan
and Norman Bates were disturbed but at least they tried to put up a polite face
to society so as not to scare people. Amanda doesn’t even bother with that.
When she eventually describes how she killed her horse, she recites the
butchery – and that’s what it is, she spares no detail – while distracted
moving around the pieces of a life-sized chessboard. At one point, she calmly
and simply tells Lily how to fake a crying jag and she doesn’t comprehend the
difference. You understand why Lily had no friends. You don’t get why Amanda
wants to be hers. Then you get to know her.
Amanda spends much of the
first chapter telling Lily that she’s taking a gap year, that she has a prominent
internship and that her stepfather is a cruel bastard. We’re inclined to
believe the latter very much – we meet him while she and Amanda are watching a
movie and he demands that Amanda leave. (Amanda has to tell him her mother’s
going through chemotherapy before he reluctantly backs off.) It is not long
after this that Amanda almost casually suggests killing him. Lily is horrified
as much by the suggestion as the reason she gives: “It would be better for
society if he was killed,” Amanda says. Lily demands Amanda leave. In the next
chapter, she visits Amanda. (The silent gratitude on her mother’s face speaks
volumes.) Lily brings up casually in the second chapter the idea of killing her
stepfather again and Amanda only recoils when it is suggested that she do it.
It doesn’t take much more persuasion to get her on board.
The thing is, by this
point, Amanda and the audience know that Lily is lying. Lily has been kicked
out of boarding school because of a plagiarism scandal and is actually angry at
her mother for not signed her ‘version’ of events which is unapologetic. When
her stepfather insists that she attend Swarthmore she is infuriated because she
doesn’t want to leave her home. And
while her stepfather (Paul Sparks) seems very much like a perfect bastard the
first two chapters of the movie, there’s a scene near the end of the third
where he lays out very plainly just how much of a spoiled brat she is. At the
end of it, Lily is pissed that Amanda didn’t kill him. “He has a point,” she tells
her. “Empathy isn’t really your strong suit.” Considering the source, that
tells you all you really need to know about Lily.
The third major character in
the film is the main source of comedy, Tim a local loser drug dealer. This was
one of the last films Anton Yelchin completed before his tragic death. Having
already shot to stardom as Chekov in the J.J. Abrams rebooting of Star Trek,
Yelchin was beginning to take roles that showed more of his range, mainly
as lowly types that were trying to punch way above their weight. (He played a
similar role in the incredible Green Room.) Tim is such a pathetic
criminal that teenagers won’t buy drugs from him. They openly mock him, saying that he went to
prison for statutory rape when he was twenty-five. (“Twenty-three!” he shouts
desperately.) He says he grand plans but is selling drugs to teenagers because
he’s scared to deal to adults. Lily and Amanda hire him, because they know he’s
desperate for money and they’re pretty sure he is so weak that they can
blackmail and bully him into doing this. In the third chapter, he is led to
their house and just stares at luxury he knows he will never have before they
force him to listen to their plan. The one moment he seems like he might be a
genuine threat, Amanda clocks him with a lamp. “You can not hesitate,” she says
calmly before moving him into the family bathtub. His protests are pathetic all
the way through. “How am I going to explain this to my father?” he actually shouts
about the wound he’s incurred. Amanda and Lily’s biggest miscalculation is that
they each think he has the spine to go through with this crime when they know
full well how pathetic he is.
It may be a spoiler to
tell you that at the end of the movie the stepfather does in fact die, but
since this movie has so many trademarks of noir, it can’t really come as a
shock. What I will not reveal is the exact details of who ends up committing and what they do to make sure they get away
with it. What I will say is that most of the final chapter involves a scene
where the two girls are sitting and watching a film and then a long period when
the murder actually happens where we hear nothing at all.
As to the epilogue, that I
will say nothing about, except that when it is over, there will be several
troubling questions that occur to you by the end. Which of the two girls truly got a happy
ending when all was said and done? And which of them is truly the most inhuman?
There are movies that are
brought up in association with this. Some might thing of Heathers, some American
Psycho, some Strangers on a Train. I kept thinking of In Cold
Blood, and how in the film we heard that the murders could not have been
committing by either of the two men by themselves. I don’t think this is the
case in Thoroughbreds; Lily wanted
her stepfather dead no matter what. So the question is: did Lily want Amanda
around because she was the only person who could she think of that would give
her permission?
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