Alice, Darling movie review: Anna Kendrick is astonishingly good in stressful psychological thriller

alice darling review

Wunmi Musaku, Anna Kendrick and Kaniehtiio Horn in a still from Alice, Darling.

Alice, Darling peaks in its opening scene. Normally, this might seem like a criticism, as if one were trying to suggest that the movie tanks immediately afterwards, or that the rest of it is poor by comparison. But it actually isn’t. Alice, Darling is excellent in these early moments, that much is undeniable, but the rest of it is quite effective too.

Anna Kendrick has played jittery women before, but her performance here is on another level altogether. She stars as the titular Alice, a young woman trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship that has drained her of all agency and self-worth. The opening scene communicates all of this near-wordlessly, and this, more than anything else, is why it’s so brilliant. Alice goes to meet her friends for dinner, but she seems anxious. We don’t know what’s troubling her yet, but we notice that she has one eye on her phone constantly.

She jumps when it buzzes; she checks every single message. But she seems distant. She’s present, but not really. Her friends exchange silent looks every time Alice shows signs of stress, as if they’ve addressed this topic between themselves before, in private. Some time later, Alice excuses herself and goes to the bathroom, where she takes a slightly racy picture of herself and sends it to somebody — we’ve realised by now what’s happening — and returns to her seat. She recoils when the server makes eyes at her, and is the first one to call it a night. She has to be home, she says.

Ostensibly just a scene in which three friends catch up over dinner, writer Alanna Francis and director Mary Nighy (daughter of Bill) are able to communicate so much subtext so effortlessly. Aided by a trio of actors perfectly in tune with the requirements of the scene, we understand not only the turmoil that Alice is going through, but also how this has impacted what probably used to be a solid friendship. Almost as an attempt to repair the strained bond, one of Alice’s friends proposes that the three of them head out to a cabin in the woods to celebrate her birthday, and while Alice agrees, she lies about it to her boyfriend.

The boyfriend, an insecure, self-involved artist named Simon, is played by Charlie Carrick with a quiet menace. He’s charming in social settings, as we are shown in one scene, and it’s easy to imagine why Alice could’ve fallen for him. Simon appears only briefly in the film’s first act, but his spectre hangs over virtually every subsequent scene.

Alice ends up going on the trip after all, having lied to Simon that she needs to travel for work. The fact that she has to do this is deeply troubling, but at this stage in the movie, Alice doesn’t recognise any red flags at all. The trip frees her from Simon’s physical presence, but it’s clear that she’s entirely under his control, psychologically. Alice has a habit of tearing her hair out in the bathroom, she nearly has a breakdown when she loses a pair of earrings that he gifted her, and she feels the need to constantly give him updates about her made-up work trip. But more than her anxiety, what the movie is able to express even more heartbreakingly is the guilt that she constantly feels for having lied to Simon.

An inescapable sense of claustrophobia hangs over the film, which is effective in getting you to immediately empathise with Alice, even when she lashes out at her friends for pointing out that she has changed. It isn’t like they’re unflappably kind to Alice. They lose patience with each other quite often, cooped up as they are in that cabin. This, you’d imagine, is how people would actually behave in situations like this. But the movie loses its focus by introducing a subplot about a missing girl that takes up way more time than it should.

Sure, this gives Alice a metaphorical excuse to unpack her own feelings, but in these scenes, the movie stops being the character-driven piece that it was, and starts feeling like a procedural. Nighy also introduces a Chekhov’s maul, which plays a key role in an ending that also feels unnecessarily dramatic; an externalisation of all the angst that Alice had been feeling. But the movie has a deep empathy for its protagonist, and understands the untidy internal dynamics of female friendships about as well as it understands the nauseating terror of being in a relationship like this. To give you perspective, if Luv Ranjan or Sandeep Reddy Vanga had made this film, Simon would’ve been the hero.

Alice, Darling

Director – Mary Nighy

Cast – Anna Kendrick, Wunmi Mosaku, Kaniehtiio Horn, Charlie Carrick

Rating – 4/5