Murder plot brings girls together again
“Thoroughbreds” freshens the trope of toxic teenage female friendship just enough to be distinctive, and relatively inoffensive in this moment of women’s empowerment. Its leads are photographed lovingly, but never while pillow fighting, and that’s progress. And their characters do not compete for a boy.
But “Thoroughbreds,” in which estranged friends Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy, from “The Witch”) and Amanda (Olivia Cooke, “Bates Motel”) reunite to compare busted moral compasses in a Connecticut mansion, is not the cerebral exercise it wants to be. It starts out strong but ends up basic, lacking the complexity of “Heavenly Creatures” or even “Wild Things.”
Rookie director Cory Finley can set a mood, and early scenes mesmerize. They take place in the imposingly large yet comfortably furnished home where the self-possessed Lily lives, and where she tutors the more unruly Amanda. Close when they were junior equestrians, the girls had not spoken in years when Amanda’s mother asked Lily — home from prep school — to tutor Amanda.
They get reacquainted through dialogue that is witty but not overly precocious, as dialogue often can be in teen films. Cooke and Taylor-Joy radiate intelligence and curiosity. They play Amanda and Lily as genuinely intrigued by what the other has been up to during their years apart.
If only Lily’s stepfather, Mark (Paul Sparks, seething with entitlement), were on board. But he does not want one teenage girl in his house, much less two. He had shipped Lily off to boarding school, but she was expelled, with the family covering up by saying she is home for an internship.
Theirs is an emotional hothouse straight out of the pages of Town & Country. Mark and Lily show their contempt quietly, WASP-ily. The atmosphere in the house is so compellingly fraught, and aesthetically lovely, that it is a shame the girls decide to off Mark.
But thrillers need a plot, and this one is fueled by Amanda’s admission to Lily that she lacks the ability to feel emotion. Lily confirms her own pathology when she entertains Amanda’s murder suggestion.
You are just figuring out who is Leopold and who is Loeb when “Thoroughbreds” leaves the mansion and goes off a creative cliff, when the girls enlist the help of a criminal (Anton Yelchin, in one of his final roles before he died in 2016).
Yelchin’s feral energy suits his character but breaks the spell of civilized hostility from earlier. The film’s holes start to show. For instance, you notice how the estate’s staff — omnipresent when Mark’s wealth needed to be established — disappears once the story demands the girls be alone in the house.
That story proves paper thin, and requires believing Amanda is devoid of empathy yet devoted to Lily — concepts too at odds to be plausible together.