Present day Connecticut: the beauty of privilege conceals the same brutal competition as everywhere else but this is the land of the 1% and all of that gets sublimated. Amanda, fresh from her own alleged atrocity, is sent to childhood friend Lily for private tutoring. It's meant to help her grades but really it's about forcing Amanda to socialise. Lily is a top shelf student but awkward to the point of brittleness but it's a brief round of honesty (with some of the best dialogue you'll hear in anything from the past ten years). It's not so much things in common as a kind of trade in skills and it turns into a film noir plan that uses their rarefied world to attack it. Less Strangers on a Train than Conspirators in Paradise, perhaps, but darkly witty, starkly purposed and lean cut.
Olivia Cooke (The Limehouse Golem) turns deadpan into threat and develops it into a wealth of nuance. Anton Yelchin, in one of his final roles before his early death, goes to town with a bad boy who could only ever be a would-be. Paul Sparks (Boardwalk Empire and House of Cards) impresses as the step-dad: a corporate figure whose business is not as relevant as his success and whose fitness regime gets more of his attention than his marriage. And as his wife, Kaili Vernoff is a woman confined by stolen power: she appears at one point in a hi-tech tanning bed that resembles the kind of coffin you might get in Vegas if you had the money. Finally, it's Anja Taylor-Joy, fresh from her breakthrough turn in the VVitch, who bears the heaviest character arc, using her fear against itself and finding an intimidating strength.
Unlike post Trump fare such as Tragedy Girls or Ingrid Goes West (both good flix, btw), Toroughbreds pares all the potential camp away from the screen, knowing that the image of wealth and social place need only be suggested for the deadly events to take power. The climax takes place off-screen in a single static shot with only the sound and light of a television. That it's chilling is how good this film is.
Join me, won't you?
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