Thoroughbreds (2017)

Directed by: Cory Finley | 91 minutes | comedy, crime | Actors: Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks, Francie Swift, Kaili Vernoff, Svetlana Orlova, Alyssa Fishenden, Jackson Damon, James Haddad, Nolan Ball, Celeste Oliva

With ‘Thoroughbreds’ (2017), the young American writer Corey Finley makes his directorial debut. Finley is a member of Youngbloods, a collective of promising playwrights aged thirty or under, and never thought his work could ever be made into a movie. He describes himself as shy and a bit insecure. He was therefore very surprised that the Oscar-winning writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (‘The Descendants’, 2011) and Alex Saks (‘The Florida Project’, 2017) were fed up with his script, wanted to produce the film adaptation and give him the green light. to direct the project themselves. “I had never been on a film set before. It was like dancing on a tightrope, looking down and seeing a deep chasm. I was overwhelmed every time I thought about what I was going to do.” Finley overcame his insecurities – or he bluffed through everything convincingly – because ‘Thoroughbreds’ is a confident directorial debut, inspired by the work of British playwright Harold Pinter and his ‘comedy of menace’. The film is dedicated to Anton Yelchin, the Russian-American actor who tragically died in 2016 at the age of just 27; this is the last film he worked on. And Finley had more young talent at his disposal: the lead roles in ‘Thoroughbreds’ are played by Olivia Cooke (the ‘dying girl’ from 2015’s ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’) and Anya Taylor-Joy, whom we have seen among others. saw in M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Split’ (2016).

At first glance, Amanda (Cooke) and Lily (Taylor-Joy) are like water to fire. The wildest stories have been circulating about Amanda since she killed her own horse. Partly because of that event, she herself has come to believe that she has no empathy and does not feel any emotions. In order not to be seen as a complete weirdo, she acts out her emotions. If it were up to her, she would skip college altogether and work her way up to success like Steve Jobs on her own. Lily seems to have it all together; her mother (Francie Swift) is married to the wealthy Mark (Paul Sparks) and she lives in a closet of a house. She seems to have a choice of universities and a bright future ahead. The two were once best friends, but the contact has faded considerably. When we first meet them, Amanda is on Lily’s doorstep for tutoring. But she’s not crazy; she knows her mother paid Lily to hang out with her. After a tentative start, it turns out they have more in common than they thought. Lily doesn’t like her stepfather very much, and after he informs her that he has enrolled her in a school for girls with behavioral problems, something inside her snaps. She dreams aloud about getting Mark out of the way and Amanda gladly jumps in. They charter Tim (Anton Yelchin), an unsuspecting dealer with a criminal record, to carry out their carefully thought-out plan.

Spoiled teenagers who turn to murder out of sheer boredom, we’ve seen that before (for example in ‘Heathers’ from 1988 and ‘Cruel Intentions’ from 1999) and a film like ‘Diabolique’ (1996) is thematically related to ‘Thoroughbreds’. ‘. But even though we’ve seen this before, Finley certainly knows how to distinguish himself with his approach and convince us, especially in the first half of the film. We immediately notice that he is a playwright by birth: Cooke and Taylor-Joy can indulge themselves with delightful dialogues, interspersed with jet-black humor, where they always try to outdo each other. This results in a fascinating interplay, in which the talented actresses can show what they have to offer; their timing and intonation is almost perfect and you can see the ice that initially stands between Amanda and Lily slowly starting to crumble. Finley plays with this by not taking the actresses together in the initial phase; later, when their friendship has been revived, we see them together: they literally grow closer to each other. Similarly, Finley makes clever and creative use of sound and the way in which sounds can amplify the power of suggestion. You don’t always have to see everything on screen to understand what’s happening. A good example is the sports addict Mark’s rowing machine, which makes an ominous noise in the background and drives Lily to despair (by the way, Mark doesn’t necessarily come across as an angry person; he’s actually quite reasonable. Lily’s willingness to kill him says more about it. her than about him).

Cooke and Taylor-Joy’s interplay is great; we see them slowly grow closer together and the facade they hold up says little about who they really are. The way in which they manage to put Tim in front of their cart and completely take it in is beautifully played out. And it’s telling that the criminal Tim turns out to be the most human of the bunch: a grubby drug dealer as the moral compass. It’s a shame that its storyline doesn’t quite turn out the way you’d like and that the film loses some of its edginess and urgency towards the end. But that not entirely satisfactory ending does little to detract from the fact that Finley here delivers an impressive debut in which he not only shows that he can write sharp dialogues, but also demonstrates that he is an excellent director, sensitive and with inspiration.