Twisted teens grab reins of ‘Thoroughbreds’
While “Thoroughbreds” brutally dispenses with an actual horse in its opening minutes, the title of writerdirector Cory Finley’s delectably nasty thriller most likely refers to its pair of privileged upper-middleclass white Connecticut teenagers.
In a spectacular mansion (that’s actually in Cohasset), Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy, “Morgan,” “The Witch”) is tutoring Amanda (Olivia Cooke, the upcoming “Ready Player One”).
Childhood schoolmates who haven’t seen each other in years, Amanda is the caustic truth teller. As Lily nervously plays nice and tries to direct the conversation to schoolwork, Amanda calls her out as a liar. Amanda’s seen her mom’s emails and knows Lily is getting $200 an hour. “You could have held out for $500,” she taunts.
As the two bond, “Thoroughbreds” cleverly twists our perceptions about who is sicker, more twisted, maybe evil.
Although she clever and engaging, Amanda’s behavior disorder yields an inability to ever feel, to have the slightest empathy for anyone. She’s proud that she’s learned to hide this and instructs Lily on how to “spontaneously” cry.
Lily is all placid surface, seething with stifling emotions that might soon explode. She hates her blunt, arrogant stepdad, Mark (Paul Sparks, perfect being perfectly awful), and wishes him dead.
Into their lair, so to speak, drunkenly steps big-talking drug-dealing sex offender
Tim (Anton Yelchin, in his final performance). Once they meet at a party, the women track Tim to his lousy job and make him an offer he can’t refuse to help with their “problem.”
Finley mounts “Thoroughbreds” with an in-yourface, formal visual style that contrasts neatly with the girls’ unbridled emotions. Both comic and revelatory, who Lily and Amanda really are becomes clear only in the film’s final moments — or does it?
The performances sing. Cooke makes Amanda so compellingly normal and smart it’s easy to almost forget she’s really a blank, a sociopath even.
Taylor-Joy remains an actor you can’t stop watching, hoping to decipher who exactly Lily is. And Yelchin’s Tim — charming, pathetic and even valiant in his efforts to escape their spidery web of deceit and murder — reminds us what a bitter loss his untimely death nearly two years ago was.