Alice, Darling

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, An Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watched something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started, all right. Today on the show, we are doing Alice Darling. Alice Darling is currently available on Amazon Prime. I read an article about how this was super personal for Anna Kendrick because apparently she was in a relationship very much like the one in this movie, and that is partially why I watched it on a plane yesterday. This is the ultimate your friends significant other, boyfriend or girlfriend sucks and you want to tell your friend break up with this person, but you don't want to say anything because they might be pissed off at you. That's what this movie is tough position to be in. I've had to totally line on some situations like that. Sometimes you're right and sometimes they work it out and you're like, man, think God didn't say anything because then they would hate you forever, right, So first fifteen minutes you're just trying to untangle what the hell is going on. Anna Kendrick is clearly terrified of her douchebag artist boyfriend, but he doesn't seem particularly awful to her. She does all

1:33 these little things in private moments that suggests she is racked with anxiety because of him. So you're sort of watching it as the viewer, You're like, what is he like? What am I not seeing? She's afraid enough of him that she lies to him about going on a totally benign girl's birthday trip. This is there is nothing wild about this trip whatsoever. This is a trip that sixty year old women could have taken. Like they just go to a cottage, they play scrabble at one point, some cinnamon rolls. It's like, there's nothing going on that it's inappropriate of this trip. And she pretends for work, and again, as always here I'll warn you before I get into any major spoilers. This is a movie that I think there's a certain tipping point where spoilers come into play, and I'll stop before that talking about the plot. So she basically pretends that she's going on a work trip goes to their girlfriends to go to this cottage. He texts her saying he misses her and saying can she come home early? And she tells her friends, one of whom it's like a birthday outing, that she needs to leave early. And again, it's this weird thing where he's not doing anything overtly wrong, but she is clearly living in a psychological prison of this relationship.

2:42 So we have to assume that all the stuff that's going on is stuff that we haven't totally been privy too. It was a little bit hard for me to relate, only because I've always been with women who are extremely outspoken. And we tell this guy to go fund himself immediately five minutes of the movie. But that's not to dismiss this. This could and does happen to a lot of people. If anything, I'm probably more likely as a guy to be the type of people please or the person that I would end up in a situation like this. We're watching her on this girl's trip. She is so consumed with anxiety that she is the worst friend ever. She won't participate in any activities. She's constantly like mean and lashing out to her friends, she's making excuses to not spend time with them even though she's with them, and then he finds out that she lied to him. Obviously, right, that's not a huge surprise. She tries to leave, but her friend hides her wall in her phone, and then she loses earrings that this guy Simon gave her in the water near the cottage and has a full on mental breakdown.

3:39 Eventually, we get some glimpses, right we see a little flash where he calls her the C word, but it's very insidious because you know, for example, she does lie to him right about going on this trip, and then he's upset that she lied to him, which is not unreasonable, and she says he has every right to be mad at lie to him, which is kind of true. But again, it's that it's dancing this fine line because her friends are like, this guy has erased your entire personality, like you are the worst, You're the worst version of yourself when you're with this guy. Even though Anna Kendrick is being a terrible friend on this birthday outing, her friends keep refusing to abandon her, and so that's kind of what you realize as the movie goes along. This is the tension and the cleverness of the film. Anna Kendrick is literally pulling her hair out and like NonStop because she's so consumed with doing anything she possibly can do to please this guy. By contrast, she's awful to her friends, like she sucks, but they won't give up on her. So you see that with him, it's clearly a conditional relationship. If she behaves perfectly, maybe he'll be satisfied with her. But with her friends it's unconditional. Even if she's a total jerk to them, they're not going anywhere. At one point when of her friends says, I made you a sandwich in case you're hungry, but don't want to admit it, and we start to understand Anakendrick is very thinnest movie that she's also not eating because she's afraid this guy's going to punish her in some way if she gains weight. And again it starts to come out slowly, slowly, and you sort of realize, Oh, this guy, it's

5:11 just like little comments, right, he's doing things where he's like kind of racking her self esteem. I knew a guy who will not be named here, and he told me a story one time about how whenever his wife was gaining weight, he would try to bring up exercising, and then if she lost weight, he would go overboard on complimenting her, so basically psychologically manipulating her and obviously like super effed up. Right Again, maybe I just for whatever reason, I've never met or been with a woman who would let something like that slide. But you know, I know there are plenty of women who fall into relationships like this, and by the way, men too, I think. And then there's a really key moment. Annakendricks says, I never know what's going to make him angry, so I spend all this time trying to purify my thoughts. And then she says, but he doesn't hurt me or anything. So again, this is a really key element of the movie. Is this guy's not physically abusive, but he's so psychologically broken her mind that she's like a like an occult, like she has to be like deprogrammed. And so again, without spoiling anything, I'll just say that there's a real arc to Anna's character and performance, and it's very satisfying. This is basically an entire movie based around when is someone going to tell this guy to fuck off, and eventually in the third act it becomes kind of almost like a horror movie, but it's all psychological. I think depending on what your family background is and how you deal with conflict, you'll relate to this

6:42 movie in different ways. I come from a Moroccan immigrant family, and then I married into a Mexican family, and on both sides of the family, if this guy actually existed, at some point, some cousin or uncle or something would be like, hey, man, get the fuck out of here. I'll put your head through a window like that would happen, and eventually, and so yeah, it just was interesting to see how it all tracked. But I think a very good character study movie. I really like these sort of movies. You see these movies every couple of years, right where it's small, limited castic characters condensed. We're just kind of with one person and their performance pieces. They're about real life, there's nothing magical happening.

7:24 And it's also a short movie. I think it's like eighty five minutes. So if you like these sorts of movies, these kind of you know, movies that are in the real world. If you're again, if you're just in the mood for that, right, Sometimes you're in the mood for something that's actually real that you can relate to. That's definitely this. If you have ever had a situation where a friend of yours is in a relationship that you think is a terrible idea, you will relate to this movie. So I would encourage you to seek it out. I thought it was definitely worth watching. And now I'm going to get into spoilers. So if you haven't seen the movie, stop listening. Or if you want to know what happens and you know that you're not going to see the movie, keep listening. In that case, So Simon appears at this isolated cabin and at this point is basically becomes a shining Right. There's a whole subplot for the whole movie about there's a missing girl, and you're like, what does this have to do with the main plot, And gradually you realize that the movie is telling you this is Anna's future if she stays with this guy. At some point he's going to flip and like, you know, put her in the trunk of his car. And the second he shows up. Because Anna Kendrick had been arching towards like regaining her personality and being joyful. The second he shows up, she reverts to the way she was before, this joyless, anxious person. And they have this extremely tense dinner, which really is like Hannibal Elector came to dinner, like he might as well have a shotgun on the table. That's the way that it feels. And then there's a scene that is the most interesting scene in the whole movie. I still don't know what to make of it. I was just very curious with the intention of it.

8:50 Was they go into a bedroom and she like dry humps him, and she seems to climax, but she also sears me having a nervous breakdown, and then he just sort of laughs. And I don't know what the what they were going for there, but it was very confusing, but in an interesting way, like I like that it confused me, and I'm not sure what it's trying to say about the characters of their relationship, but I liked it forcing me to think about it. And then she's going to leave with him, and all this tension that's been building up and building up the whole movie, it's all psychological, becomes physical and her friends, one of her friends takes this they call it a mall. I guess it's it's a it's a different kind of acts. She takes this thing that's been established earlier in the movie, and she breaks his rear windshield and forces Anna to choose.

9:39 She's either choosing between her friends or this jerk boyfriend. And her friends physically surround her and step between her. One of her friends steps between her and him, and the other friend just stares in her eyes and you really feel them come together. You really feel the way to that. Wouldn't me. Mosaku, who's in We Own This City, is in this movie. She's really great in it. She just has a great I don't know how to describe it. She has a really kind of warmth to her as a performer that makes her Your eye goes to her. She's very effective. I feel like this is a great movie to watch, not a great couple movie. Great movie to watch with friends, not a great movie to watch with significant other. This is not a good date movie. I would say that's all you need is you start Mike Randall as like your relationship, like, oh you said that to me one time. But I think a good movie watch with friends or Goode watched by yourself. Short movie, like I said, eighty five minutes and I think pretty well done. So one of one of the better sort of character seti indie movies that I've seen in last year or so. That is the show for today. I am continuing to watch The Night Agent and we're really getting into guilty pleasure territory, pretty hardcore. So I think that I have no choice but to do a debate episode with somebody.

10:58 Might be a one friend of mine in the industry, you might be, it might be somebody else. But that's I'm teasing that if you finished the entire season of The Night Agent and you want to talk about both the things that are great about it and the things that are just straight up kind of silly about it, that episode is for sure going to come up. So that is a show for today. As always, you can reach me at Dan Advoyagemedia dot com, Betty Moore Dan on Twitter, watch This Tonight on Instagram, or watch This Tonight podcast on TikTok. Thank you for listening. Until next time, Bye bye.