Kendrick impresses as a woman being deprived of emotional oxygen by a toxic boyfriend, though Mary Nighy’s film gets distracted by a subplot
-style suspense drama about a young woman trapped in a coercive, abusive relationship from screenwriter Alanna Francis and debut feature director Mary Nighy. There are some edge-of-the-seat moments and interestingly subtle tonal inflexions, though the story spends time on a contrived subplot about a missing girl, time that might have been better devoted to developing the central thriller storyline.
Alice is in a toxic relationship with Simon , an arrogant, controlling man with an uncertain career as an artist, in constant need of reassurance and always tracking Alice’s movements. When Alice is allowed out for a rare evening at a bar with her two best friends Tess and Sophie , we can see how glassy-eyed Alice’s smile is, how tensely distracted, how she flinches at each ping from her phone.
Francis’s script allows us to notice that her friend Tess is also an artist , and we can see the queasy irony in Alice having possibly met Simon in Tess’s circle, and how he is coldly taking her away from them. Tensely aware that Simon won’t like it, Alice accepts an invitation to go away on a vacation with Tess and Sophie but tells him it’s a work trip she can’t get out of.
Kendrick is capable of creating an arrhythmic heartbeat of tension and fear in her screen presence: this is someone who is gradually being deprived of emotional oxygen. But sometimes the tendons in the script go slack – and there is also something here which doesn’t quite allow the relationship between Alice and her friends, and relationship of Tess and Sophie with each other, to become fully three-dimensional.
Alice, Darling is released on 20 January in cinemas in the US and UK with an Australian release date to be confirmed.
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