NETWORK FRAIL
Rosamund Pike’s CEO con artist bites off more than she can chew when she scams one elderly person too many in this fine thriller
I CARE A LOT (15)
GONE GIRL goes bad, despicably bad, in J Blakeson’s lip-smacking thriller, which is a portrait of unremitting cruelty and greed. Anchored by an incendiary lead performance from Rosamund Pike, I Care A Lot is a chilling portrait of profit-driven villainy, which conceals a distorted Machiavellian grin behind the public facade of a guardian angel in designer threads.
“There’s no such thing as good people,” professes Pike’s morally corrupt anti-heroine in a prosaic voiceover monologue set to Death In Vegas’ haunting Dirge.
That’s unquestionably true of the rogues gallery of misfits, opportunists and thugs who swarm in Blakeson’s lean and gleefully mean-spirited script.
Everyone is working an angle, some more successfully and ruthlessly than others, and when the end credits roll on a disconcertingly loopy and hare-brained second act, it’s a satisfyingly messy final hurrah that refuses to pander to sentimentality.
The American Dream – to be rich, successful and in control – is warped into a living nightmare, which can legally remove elderly citizens from their homes and seize control of their assets.
Marla Grayson (Pike) is the founder and CEO of Grayson Guardianships who petitions judges to grant her custody of frail, vulnerable people to prevent them becoming a burden in their twilight years.
Testimony from Dr Karen Amos (Alicia Witt) confirms the early signs of dementia and seals each prospective ward’s fate.
In truth, Marla is a sharp-suited con artist who makes her money by selling off her victims’ homes once they are heavily sedated at expensive living facilities and unable to defend themselves.
Marla goes from hunter to prey when she turns up at the front door of Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) brandishing a court order.
As the elderly homeowner becomes another cash cow for Marla and partner Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) to milk dry, lawyer Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) arrives unannounced at the Grayson office with a warning.
Ms Peterson has powerful
friends. If Marla continues to hold Jennifer against her will, there will be consequences.
“You’re in trouble now,” cackles Jennifer in a heavily medicated haze as her protector (Peter Dinklage) initiates a campaign of terror against the co-conspirators.
I Care A Lot conceals more than one satisfying sting in the tail as Marla fights for survival.
Pike’s deliciously vile ice queen deep-freezes every frame and she’s matched by a colourful supporting turn from Dinklage as a hot head, who communicates most effectively with bullets and bruised knuckles. A tautly paced opening hour loses dramatic momentum as Harrogateborn writer-director Blakeson’s picture becomes almost as unhinged as its diabolical central character. However, there is sufficient acid-laced method beneath the escalating madness to sustain a chokehold on our attention.
■ On Amazon Prime Video from Friday.
WHEN up-and-coming British filmmaker Oliver Milburn read School’s Out Forever, a YA novel about a deadly global pandemic, he never could have imagined that a decade later he would make it into a film that foreshadowed real events.
Described by its author Scott K. Andrews as “mixing Lord of the Flies with The Hunger Games”, the instalment of the writer’s Afterblight Chronicles puts a new twist on the term “post-apocalyptic dystopia”, as it follows a teenage boy who discovers a virus has swept across the globe killing everyone who does not have O-negative blood type, and he must seek refuge in his school.
“I read the book when I was working part time in a library,” says Oliver, who has previously made some horror shorts and one feature called The Harsh Light Of Day.
“It was completely random, I saw the cover, thought ‘That looks cool’ and then read it and thought, ‘This is really cool’.
“I could imagine people feeling the way I felt about this book, seeing it on screen... and there was an appeal of doing what our producer described as ‘Mad Max in the Home Counties’.
“The scenario gives you licence to have a kind of wild west but in somewhere like rural England. Very few people, no laws – that’s all fun.
“And then there was something appealing to me about doing an apocalyptic story, of which we’ve seen many, but centred around really quite tender teenage themes. What’s really at the core of the film was a boy missing his mum and trying to do the right thing by her.
“Like all good genre stuff, that then is a great metaphor for what you do in life. I thought that was a really nice way of exploring a lawless world, what would my mum want me to do?”
The story follows Lee, played by Ladhood actor Oscar Kennedy, a scholarship student at posh boys’ school St Mark’s, in the middle of rural England, who gets in big trouble for a prank and is expelled by the headmaster (Buffy star Anthony Head) on the same day the government begins talking about closing the border to prevent the spread of a deadly virus. Starting to sound eerily familiar? “When we were developing the film, people didn’t get it, they didn’t get that you could just have a virus,” Oliver recalls.
“People constantly mentioned zombies, that we should have zombies in it, or a bomb, or a something – they didn’t get the idea of an apocalyptic event, caused purely by a pandemic.
“Of course now we absolutely could understand that, and everybody gets it.
“I think it’s inevitable that it will colour people’s experience of watching it. I hope that’s for the better – I certainly hope it doesn’t offend anyone who’s had ill relatives and things because that obviously was never the intention.
“Aside from anything else, I think probably a lot of people will spot the things we didn’t get right, like, ‘Why is no one wearing any masks?’, which just didn’t occur to me at the time.
“We actually photoshopped a mask onto one of the news stories that he reads on his phone because we were like, ‘We’ve got to have a mask in here’. That was towards the end of the post-production.
“But I could never have predicted it, and it is – especially considering how long it took to get to the screen – such a strange coincidence.”
The timeliness strikes Oscar too. “I remember the first reading of the script and just being instantly drawn in by the fresh take on the apocalypse genre,” says the actor who is actually 22, but easily passes for a teenager.
“I read the synopsis, when it was first sent through, and I thought they were kind of saying in a roundabout way ‘this is like a zombie film’.
“That’s what really took me by surprise in a good way, it’s really refreshing to see it’s just about people learning to survive in amongst each other in this horrible situation.
“I probably do see a bit of Lee in myself, I think that was one thing that struck me when I read the script.
“I don’t think I was quite as naughty as Lee but I think I definitely was a bit of a class clown, trying to get laughs and [being] generally silly.”
While Oscar, who has previously appeared in Great Expectations, Hunted and The White Queen, felt he could relate to Lee, that did not make the prospect of taking on a leading role in a film feel any less daunting.
“I remember when I got the call saying they wanted me to play Lee and being really quite nervous and thinking, is this going to be too much pressure?
“But that all instantly went away, when I met Ollie properly after all the audition process, and we went for a coffee.
“He really put my mind at ease. I felt that everyone knew what they were doing and there wasn’t really anything for me to worry about other than turn up and try and do my job as best as I can.”
■ School’s Out Forever is available for digital download now and is available on DVD and Blu-ray from April 12.