This film had a one night only release at the local theater. I don’t say no to going in cold on Maika Monroe (as you, and Joe Keery, are all fully aware) and Charli XCX, queen of cinematic hot takes hacked and not:
There’s a lot about this movie that opens it up to praise. Its absurdist sensibilities and out of time setting give it a fairytale quality that lets it float around in a timeless space borrowing from fashion and cultural norms of a fictional place while also commenting on the present–something out of The Great or The Favourite (Tony McNamara staples). There’s this amazing line in the first act when one man is defining the “ideal wife” to another man: “beautiful, chaste, good listener, good at mending socks, good at maps, chess, and falcons.”
I scrawled “Scheherazade” in my notes early on in the movie when I caught onto the essential plot but then the film doesn’t really commit to the Scheherazade plotline because it doesn’t have enough content to be able to do so. Charli XCX is criminally underused for the amount of space she shares on the advertising for this movie. There isn’t really a twist to this movie, which is where it falters in the second act. When (spoilers) the story finally answers “what’s in the box” and the answer is basically Women’s Empowerment, it sort of loses the thread of what makes the humor and inventiveness of the plot so fun to begin with. I think that’s the exact point at which Friend got up from their seat to take a break or voice a political position, I’m not sure.
