The concept of the thoroughbred is that the better the lineage, the more refined the offspring. In pitch-black observational comedy Thoroughbreds, America’s nouveau aristocracy is put under a very unflattering lens.
The spur is an unseen crime: diffident rich kid Amanda (Olivia Cooke, Bates Motel), a horse, a darkened stable, a knife. After that, only Lily (The Witch‘s Anya Taylor-Joy) will even be seen around Amanda, who has jumped in high school society from weird to pariah. Nominally, Lily is just helping her benighted former best friend with her SATs. But Amanda has little interest in college, and why would boarding school success story Lily be wasting her own lofty ambitions of Andover and corporate internships on the neighborhood outcast? Darker, twisting schemes are clearly afoot.
The fact that the protagonists are teenage girls will inevitably invoke Heathers references, but this is more akin to the acerbic wit of a Kind Hearts and Coronets. The debut feature by writer/director Cory Finley began as a script for stage, not screen, and that shines through in the intricate dance of dialogue. There’s a hint of David Mamet in his use of strictly defined silences, and flat statements as heavy implications.
It’s also in the staging: barring a couple of elegantly crafted excursions, everything takes place in the ground floor of one or the other girl’s home. Shades of the classic crime-comedy-thriller Deathtrap circle, as sharp-tongued banter becomes bloody intent.
Finley weaves little intricacies and details into the fabric of his story. There are constant references to what success is, with plagiarized essays and “Steve Jobs-ing it” all valid options for making it to adulthood. Life is a grift for these Massachusetts neo-blue bloods, with consequences only mattering if you let them bother you. This would seem trite, but his script’s razor-sharp timing is given detail by the flawless delivery from his leads. Cooke gives Amanda an engaging immediacy as a fake-it-’til-you-make-it sociopath girl; counterbalancing her is yet another outstanding performance by Taylor-Joy, who gives Lily a brittle delicacy that disguises her own disturbing secrets.
Yet, for all its clear theatre-bound roots, Thoroughbreds never once feels stagey. Finley makes audacious cinematic decisions, like melding Erik Friedlander’s discordant score with a repetitive and eventually essential sound effect: or racking the focus hard in pivotal moments, shifting emphasis and attention between foreground players and background clues. That reflects in how he pivots around sympathies, to the point that statutory rapist/drug dealer Tim (another painfully beautiful reminder how effortlessly talented the late Anton Yelchin was) may be the most principled person in town.
Thoroughbreds
Thursday, Sep 28, 12:30pm
Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 21-29. Follow all the announcements, news, reviews, and interviews at www.austinchronicle.com/fantasticfest.
This article appears in September 22 • 2017.
