Thor­ough­breds

Hol­ly­wood doesn’t real­ly do nasty. On the rare occa­sions it does, there’s always some handy switch-back, or last minute reprieve or redemp­tion or moral­is­tic salve to help alle­vi­ate any poten­tial suf­fer­ing on the part of the view­er. Per­haps this is why Michael Haneke’s Amer­i­can remake of his own Fun­ny Games, a scathing­ly iron­ic satire on the seduc­tive nature of screen vio­lence, crashed and burned.

We like to see peo­ple torch­ing insects with a well-placed mag­ni­fy­ing glass, but we need to learn why they’re an awful per­son for doing so. Yet you spend the length of Cory Finley’s Thor­ough­breds watch­ing as the plane plum­mets into the ravine, wait­ing, wait­ing, wait­ing for it to pull up and for every­one on board to be saved. And it sim­ply refus­es to go there.

In Connecticut’s frou-frou sub­ur­ban nir­vana of stuc­co man­sions, gas bar­be­cues and dads who play extreme sports, some­thing wicked is brew­ing. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Lily has been asked to give Olivia Cooke’s Aman­da some pri­vate tuition, and from the o there’s a cut-glass ten­sion between the ter­ri­ble two­some. The for­mer is a prim, dis­il­lu­sioned queen bee who is suf­fer­ing at the hands of her med­dling, ener­gy shake-chug­ging step father and cow­er­ing door­mat moth­er. The lat­ter is a social­ly mal­ad­just­ed ​‘trou­ble stu­dent’ who made some­thing of a name for her­self when she, err, went a bit mad and butchered a racehorse.

Scaber­ous dia­logue exchanges are the lifeblood of their ini­tial meet­ings, though nei­ther par­ty is will­ing to give in to the oth­er. Soon they realise that per­haps there’s a dark con­nec­tion draw­ing them clos­er, and that they could do some real dam­age if they put their heads togeth­er. Debu­tant writer/​director Fin­ley offers few sen­ti­men­tal con­ces­sions to his Wednes­day Addams-like leads, and we only remain on their side by dint of the satel­lite char­ac­ters being even more venal and revolting.

When a casu­al deci­sion is made to plot a mur­der, it bare­ly rais­es an eye­brow, as these women appear not only born to kill, but also born to get away with it. Anton Yelchin’s Tim is their pat­sy, a burnout drug deal­er who is con­vinced that big-time pros­per­i­ty is but a hop and skip away. Des­per­ate to assert his faux macho pos­tur­ing over the younger women, they play him for the schmuck he is in order to see through their own das­tard­ly scheme. Fin­ley nev­er overt­ly states his themes, despite the fact that the film appears as a broad cri­tique of the unchecked pow­er wield­ed by the more afflu­ent among us.

When you have every­thing, it’s dif­fi­cult to know what more you could want, and so Thor­ough­breds sug­gests that desire starts to nat­u­ral­ly creep towards deeply anti-social ter­rain. Tay­lor-Joy and Cooke make for a cosy match, both con­vinc­ing­ly lost in the moral tun­dra and unwill­ing to mope about the fact. The at com­po­si­tions with­in Lily’s gigan­tic home (where much of the film takes place) makes it look immac­u­late­ly tidy to the point that no one actu­al­ly lives there. A mas­sive amount of space reveals no mate­r­i­al trin­kets to o er signs of human life.

Like Fun­ny Games, this might prove too bar­bar­ic to con­nect with a broad audi­ence, but as a glassy-eyed shock­er with true crime trap­pings, it goes down a chilly treat.