SHADOWS Netflix Party Friday April 10@8.30 pm (EST): THOROUGHBREDS

"You know, the thing about this town is, the sawdust smells fantastic. But you are still in a hamster cage."

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?

MIFF Session 11: THOROUGHBREDS

A billionaire belt of a Connecticut town. A teenaged girl stares down a horse. Her expression is unnervingly blank. A Gladstone bag from which she draws a large knife.

The same girl is admitted to a palatial home on a bright afternoon for private tuition with the daughter of the house, also a teenager, Lily. The lesson falls flat as the first girl, Amanda, reveals that she has no feelings and has spent her life faking joy, sadness etc. to get by until her deed with the horse and psychiatry caught up with her. The two establish (strike up is far too jolly) a friendship or rather rekindle one as it is revealed they had been friends at primary school. We are left to guess what changed that until adolescence. The girls' budding acquaintance is interrupted by Lily's stepfather Mark who is in his buff and managerial forties and looks upon both girls before him with something neither they nor we find easy. Add a local drug dealer too slow for girls like this and you have a plot ... about a plot.

Wait, haven't we already seen this in Tragedy Girls or Mean Girls or Heathers or even Ginger Snaps? Of course we have but each one that works (and this one does) sets its own table. Tragedy Girls added the manipulable narcissism of the screen-addicted generation, Mean Girls played like Restoration comedy in the Valley, Heathers was meant to be Kubrick's high school movie. What Thoroughbreds adds is a depiction of a generation so planned and eugenic and protected that symptoms of sociopathy look like chapter titles from a self help management book (the chapter cards, though not titled, that divide this film are not merely cute). These are the inheritors of the dot com me -first one percent whose endless houses (the scene of Lily searching for her mother is a long Scorsese-like tracking shot through rooms of so many decorative themes they look like a sample living installation) hold the future corporate monsters, capital pirates and pirates in the Capitol.

The deftly written dialogue between the girls could be by Harold Pinter and the flat perfection of its delivery plugs straight into the greatness of Heathers and its inheritors with performances from Anya Taylor-Joy with her terrifyingly too young face and the more earthy but unsettlingly deadpan Olivia Cooke as Amanda. The late Anton Yelchin contributes great comic pathos with his Tim the dealer and Paul Sparks (whose versatility has taken him from the giggling psycho in Boardwalk Empire to the tragic figure of House of Cards) is both intimidating and unironically hilarious as Mark.

Add a score made or parts of the orchestra misbehaving rather than an orchestral score (which it is but only technically) and you have a deadly black comedy more Trump-era ready than Tragedy Girls, and that's saying something. I hope that, unlike that undersung gem, that Thoroughbreds gets a proper post-festival release and reaches out to what is left of the cultists of cinema who have been starving around  the feeble braziers of Irreversible or Fight Club for too long. This is great cinema, lean and hungry. Offer yourselves, the joy is in the eating.

Oh, sorry, almost forgot: ;)


Screening notes: I don't have a problem with Comedy Theatre seating but that's because I like the front row and had only two companions-by-default to enjoy it with. I was able to nab a choc top from the anesthetic kiosk just before the screening and enjoyed the holy living hell out of the film. Tomorrow's session is on standby. Weep for me.