Taglines: Good Breeding Gone Bad.
In suburban Connecticut, upper-class high schooler Amanda euthanizes her crippled horse with a knife, resulting in charges of animal cruelty. Sometime later, Amanda arrives at the home of the more popular and academically inclined Lily. The girls were previously best friends but grew apart after the death of Lily’s father. They meet under the pretense of hanging out and having a casual tutoring session, but Amanda knows that her mother has paid Lily to socialize with Amanda. Lily denies being paid, but Amanda, left emotionless by an unspecified mental disorder, is unfazed. Lily meets with Amanda again, this time voluntarily, and they rekindle their friendship.
Lily lives with her mother, Cynthia, and stepfather, Mark, an abusive man she hates. One night, Amanda asks if Lily has ever thought about killing Mark, upsetting Lily. However, tensions flare between Lily and Mark when Mark enrolls Lily in a boarding school for girls with behavioral issues. After seeing him berate Cynthia, Lily reconsiders and calls Amanda about the notion of killing him. She proposes that Amanda perform the murder as Amanda would not experience guilt.
However, Amanda believes that her pending animal-cruelty trial would make her an immediate suspect. They decide instead to blackmail drug dealer Tim into murdering Mark while the two girls are out of town. The night of the planned murder, Tim arrives on the property but leaves without killing Mark. The girls agree not to contact Tim again, as his own criminal history will prevent him from alerting the police. Lily impulsively prepares to kill Mark herself but is talked out of it by Amanda.
One night, Lily and Amanda are watching a film at Lily’s home when Lily reveals she spiked Amanda’s drink with Rohypnol so she could stab Mark to death and frame Amanda. Lily attempts to back out of the plan, but Amanda, realizing a life spent without emotions is “meaningless,” willingly finishes the drink. While Amanda is unconscious, Lily murders Mark and rubs Amanda with his blood, crying and holding the unconscious Amanda for comfort.
Some time later, Lily encounters Tim, who now works as a restaurant valet. Following Mark’s death, Lily has once again found academic success and is interviewing for college admission. They talk about the murder (though Lily lies about what really happened), and Lily mentions having received a letter from Amanda, who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital for the crime. The letter is shown to detail Amanda’s life at the hospital, including a recurring dream about a future in which humans let the world fall into disarray due to their vanity, leading to it being overrun by thoroughbred horses. When Tim asks what the letter said, Lily says she threw the letter away without reading it.
Thoroughbreds is a 2017 American dark comedy thriller film written and directed by Cory Finley, in his directorial debut. It stars Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks and Francie Swift. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2017, and was released on March 9, 2018, by Focus Features. It is the last U.S. theatrical release to star Yelchin, who died in June 2016.
Thoroughbreds follows high-school student Lily (Taylor-Joy) and her emotionless friend Amanda (Cooke) as they scheme to kill Lily’s stepfather (Sparks) via contract with a drug dealer (Yelchin). The film grossed $3 million against a $5 million budget and received positive reviews from critics, who praised the ambitious direction, screenplay and performances, particularly from Cooke and Taylor-Joy.
Film Review for Thoroughbreds
Empathy is weakness and privilege is power. Adjust the quantifiables on those two metrics enough and you end up with the dangerous type of people who can do just about anything and walk away clean. With his razor-sharp and oil slick first feature Thoroughbreds, writer-director Cory Finley has made a pitch black comedy thriller about the perils of unchecked privilege in the hands of two WASPy weirdos and what happens when they decide they want someone gone from the world.
Ex-BFFs Amanda (Olivia Cooke) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) have a forced reunion when Amanda’s mother pays Lily an exorbitant fee to tutor and hang out with her daughter after Amanda becomes a social pariah for killing her horse. Inseparable as kids, the duo drifted apart over the years and their reunion is fraught with unspoken tension — until Amanda makes it clear she doesn’t give a fig for propriety, quite the contrast to her prim pal, and severs that tension with blunt force candor. Once the two get fired up, they are a combustible engine for the film, their seriously strange chemistry ensuring that Thoroughbreds courses with energy.
After spending years as a source of droll warmth on Bates Motel, Cooke gets to play the Norman Bates of the pair as Amanda, a young woman entirely without emotions. “It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person,” she explains, “It just means that I have to try harder than everyone else to be good.” But she doesn’t try that hard. She practices her emotions, using “the technique” to cry and rehearsing smiles in the mirror, but she’s reached a point where she’s finished pretending she’s normal.
Amanda is curious and unflappable, and she’s also a bit terrifying, especially when she’s detailing the gruesome way she executed her horse. It’s only described, never seen, but you get the picture in head-swimming detail and it’s easy to understand why the people of the affluent, pristine town look at Amanda with such fearful disdain. Credit to Finley’s sharp script and Cooke’s charismatic performance, however, because the audience can’t help but be charmed by the budding sociopath even if immediate unease sets in anytime she enters a room.
Taylor-Joy stars as the other half of the sideways duo and after her breakout work in The Witch and Split, she continues to prove she’s one of the most interesting and commanding actresses of a generation. Light flocks to her, the focus somehow seems sharper when it’s steadied on her face; to borrow that hackneyed phrase, the camera loves Taylor-Joy and whatever “that thing” is that makes a star, she’s got it in spades.
Lily is a polished product of pedigree and Taylor-Joy’s measured performance is a perfect counterbalance for Cooke’s brash and outlandish character. If Amanda can’t feel anything, Lily can only seem to feel rage and disgust, even if she keeps it tamped down behind a thick veneer of manners. In particular, her anger as directed at her new stepdad (Paul Sparks), an obscenely wealthy but intolerable living Ken Doll who collects swords, endlessly exercises, berates Lily’s mother savagely, and totally lost patience for his stepdaughter the moment she got kicked out of Andover for plagiarism.
When Amanda and Lily reunite, it’s only a matter of time before they decide he has to go. In Amanda, Lily has a sounding board off which she can bounce an idea, no matter how reprehensible, without judgment and it doesn’t take very long for those ideas to take a distinctly dark turn as her moral reserves are drained in favor of what she wants most — for her shitty stepdad (and to be fair he is very shitty) to just disappear.
When they start devising a plan, they reel in the local lowlife drug dealer, played by Anton Yelchin — the final role he shot before his untimely death. Yelchin is fantastic, overflowing with a reservoir of emotion in what lesser actors may have seen as a thankless role. His talent is missed and his talent here is a heartbreaking reminder of his singular quality as a performer.
On all levels, Thoroughbreds is a technical wonder. Finley penned a script driven by snappy dialogue, and it’s no surprise to learn that he originally intended the film as a stage play, but he also directs the shit out of this movie, sculpting a world of immaculate, marble-pillared extravagance and high society propriety.
Finley builds remarkable tension with little affect, letting the strength of pace, editing and performance do the heavy lifting. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night cinematographer Lyle Vincent does some fine work helping Finely carve out that precise opulence, and though Thoroughbreds may have its roots in theater, it’s always cinematic. The score is also crucial, a percussive piece that alternates between droning and melodic (though rarely), underscoring the mounting tension with pops and jolts of disjointed percussion.
Thoroughbreds conjures a lot of films to mind — there’s the disaffected wealth of Cruel Intentions, the scheming female bond of Heavenly Creatures, and the irreverent dialogue-fuelled teen drama of Jawbreakers and Heathers. But if Finley’s debut bears the DNA of other teens-behaving-badly cinema past, it’s the distinct qualities and proud uniqueness that make it an effed up tale of friendship for the ages.
Thoroughbreds (2018)
Directed by: Cory Finley
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks, Francie Swift, Kaili Vernoff, Chaunty Spillane, Leah Procito, Stephanie Atkinson, Max Ripley, Lauren Laperriere
Screenplay by: Cory Finley
Production Design by: Jeremy Woodward
Cinematography by: Lyle Vincent
Film Editing by: Louise Ford
Costume Design by: Alex Bovaird
Set Decoration by: Kyra Friedman Curcio
Music by: Erik Friedlander
Distributed by: Focus Features
Release Date: March 9, 2018
Visits: 41
