Becky is what if Home Alone but Murder. It requires several stretches of the imagination, like the idea of a nice family buying a vacation cabin near a lake previously owned by a Neo-Nazi, or the inexplicable cynophobia of several recently escaped convicts, but at the same time, we’re asked to seriously underthink it when we start asking questions about the purpose of the mysterious Nazi Key or the reason for not running “one and a half miles” to the neighbors in the course of the day. Amanda Brugel has a meta moment of clarity when she snaps and starts shouting her feelings about the movie at Kevin James, “What the fuck was even the point of any of this?” Kevin James–who ought to do more of these movies where he’s a Nazi villain in the style of Patrick Stewart from Green Room–doesn’t answer, because there are no words.
If the film is trying to make some point about the childhood trauma of losing a parent or making a new family, it doesn’t do it well, and certainly the Nazi offering to be your replacement father while circling one another in a death challenge is not helping the matter. On the positive side, there are several events that kick off ticking time clocks that ratchet up the tension: the torturing of Joel McHale, which one might not expect to cause too much heartache, forces Becky’s hand a little, as does the OnStar phone call to the police in classic We’re Out of Ideas! fashion, and the Nazis are obviously all on a bit of a timetable themselves. Lulu Wilson is also very hipster fashionable while she’s reaching into her bag of murder tricks.
I made the mistake of watching this movie because I mistook Lulu Wilson for MacKenzie Davis.
I’m not holding that against Lulu, and if it had actually been MacKenzie, I feel like the age similarity between Becky and her father would’ve made this harder to follow than it already was–at one point one of the family dogs that isn’t gunned down in cold blood seems to be killed with a single KO punch but then wakes up, because it was just sleeping the whole time. Brugel, unusually pushy step-mom material (“You let your [grieving] daughter step all over you”), is probably pissed off that she did less work to free herself than the world’s least reliable child murderer who discovers a conscience in the last few minutes of the film. There was an opportunity to let her participate in her own revenge narrative and expiate a little bit of Becky’s bloodlust by saving her or at least not making her the sole angel of death of the film, but I guess it made more sense to give that mantle to the child murderer.
Probably not worth it. You can do better, even if I couldn’t.
