A thriller that lives up to the name

There are films and there are films. A lot are highly rated, some very very. And I watch and I nod my head and ferret out a fine performance here, great sets and costumes there, an interesting storyline or theme. But so few really consume me. So, it’s exciting when I do find one that does. As was the case this weekend when I accidentally tripped over J. Blakeson’s I Care a Lot (2020) on Netflix, bookended bv Find Me Falling (Stelana Kliris 2024) with Harry Connick Jr. (saccharine romantic) and Locked In (Nour Wazzi 2023) with a mainly no-name cast drifting through endless fraught psychological evil. Wow, here’s a thriller that lives up to the name! Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike, who won a Golden Globe for her performance) is a professional guardian whose grift is to take over the estates of elderly people and extract their proceeds for herself. Her caring is all a veneer as she fends off offended family members who the courts obviously can’t trust because of personality flaws. Until, one day, she dissolves the estate of Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a retired but fully functioning senior living her best life in an elegant house on a bucolic tree-lined street. Marla has a scam with a local doctor who signs certificates over to her for “difficult” patients and Jennifer is one. But what Marla doesn’t know is that Jen’s outward demureness comes with baggage. That’s in the person of Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage). From here, the movie transforms into a kind of high stakes tennis match on steroids, with the two sides enveloped in a war of frenzied wits with each as corrupt and ruthless as the other. It’s a gripping tale and you don’t ever know how it’s going to end until, well, the very end – the way all good thrillers should be. Marla’s emotional ferocity is underlined by composer Marc Canham’s superb clanging score. Her seemingly Houdini-like properties are rivalled by Lunyov’s icy black cunning. There is a social theme, I suppose, to all of this: the exploitation of the old both by the institutional care establishment (think thousands of dollars a month for living facilities). And the way society treats the aged, as throwaway human husks, their worth – personally and financially – exhausted.