"I'm sorry my performance wasn't good enough."

Aaah, "Murder on the Dancefloor"... Takes me back to my early 2000's pop British invasion teenage years right there.

I'm not completely sure what to make of Emerald Finnell's sophomore feature, a feeling I still have for her Promising Young Woman as well. There's a lot going on here and I still can't tell if it's truly wonderful (the ingesting of bodily fluids included) or simply a vapid exercise in genre duality - and maybe that's exactly the point - but, I will tell you this, it is gorgeous as hell to look at and to listen to for every single minute of its running time.

The idea of abjection seems to be central in theme here and while that has been used in so many great (and not great) films (The Talented Mr. Ripley comes to mind first here, at least to some degree), it is the catalyst for our unreliable narrator spinning his moth's web as it were. We learn this in drops, trickles and then free-flowing bathwater as the third act climax and denouement reveal all of Oliver's best laid plans to us.

Though it seems inevitable in hindsight, how Finnell chooses to show us the way in which Oliver wheedles his way into these people's lives is what holds me back from loving it the way so many have expressed. It is not Oliver that I have a problem with, but the plot he's inserted into. He feels beneath it, all of it - a god among laymen. He's better, smarter, more insidious than the story he's given, in which he takes over this hopelessly shallow, insipid and beautiful family. Ultimately, this holds Oliver and the film back from being the great character he should be and kind of film this story set it up to be. As dark and depraved as it is, it could and should be so much more.

***If I wasn't already head over heels in love enough with Rosamund Pike, well, this film made me fall head over feet. She makes every single line reading sing and sting in the best of ways and allows the comedic elements of Finnell's sharp writing to open up her caricature of a character and the film itself up in ways that couldn't have been accessed otherwise. Also, kudos to Carey Mulligan for a glorified cameo role that steals the film's early scenes out from under the main cast and made me wish she would do a comedy because my god has she got everything in spades!