‘Alice, Darling’ Review: Anna Kendrick Gives the Best Performance of Her Career in Gut-Wrenching Drama
Anna Kendrick, Wunmi Mosaku and Kaniehiito Horn magnify the screen in a short, but difficult to watch drama.
The best dramas are the ones that linger on you long after it’s over, as challenging to watch as they were. This happens with Alice, Darling-- Mary Nighy’s feature directorial debut. In it, Anna Kendrick delivers a performance of rare vulnerability that all of its emotional power comes from how she interacts with her best friends (played by Wunmi Mosaku and Kaniehiito Horn) as they spend the week at Sophie’s (Mosaku) cottage away from Alice’s abusive boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick).
Nighy doesn’t directly show physical or psychological abuse, or at least sparsely through extremely brief flashbacks. Instead, she focuses her camera on Alice and how small changes in Simon’s personality terrify her. The audience doesn’t need to be shown much since Simon’s smallest actions are tormenting enough — clasping his hand on her neck on every occasion during his art exhibit as he talks to other people, wanting a picture of her breasts every time Alice is away from him, and forcing her into sex before they go to sleep. At the same time, Simon uses triggering words to get to her head while she is away to want her to return to him before he gets angry.
These elements are shown — they’re subtle but take an emotional toll on Alice when she leaves home to spend time with her friends. While thinking of Simon, she throws up and pretends that everything is fine and that her relationship with Simon is built on love. But, of course, her friends don’t believe in that and stage an intervention to help her break off her connection with Simon. However, tensions rise when he shows up at the cottage, and this is where the film’s emotional catharsis reaches its apex through a riveting final sequence brilliantly showcasing Kendrick, Mosaku, and Horn’s acting skills.
While the film contains a lot of intense emotional moments, the quieter scenes between Kendrick, Mosaku, and Horn are the most powerful. The best actors are the ones that are capable of conveying a lot with as little effort as possible. Kendrick’s performance as Alice seems restrained, but everything is in how she acts around her friends by keeping quiet, ripping off strands of her hair, continuously repeating the same line while looking at a mirror, or distancing herself within the frame from her friends. This makes the film’s more emotional scenes far more powerful when they hit, especially when Simon arrives in the frame again.
There’s always that lingering feeling that Simon controls every aspect of Alice’s life from afar. And even if he’s not physically there until the final act, you can feel his presence lingering in Alice’s shadow. But it wouldn’t have worked without a compelling performer like Kendrick, who can convey Alice’s dramatic tension with minimal impact until she reaches her breaking point.
Those elements make the film worth seeing, even if it is sometimes difficult to watch as it deals with triggering subject matters head-on. But unlike Florian Zeller’s The Son, another movie dealing with complex subjects, Nighy treats Alice’s psychological abuse with some form of distance and dignity, never as a way to manipulate the audience into crying. Nevertheless, the performances are powerful enough, and she lets her camera focus on them as long as possible.
Doing all of this in an 89-minute runtime is also even more impressive. It never overstays its welcome, although there are instances in which the characters could’ve been more fleshed out. But it doesn’t necessarily matter. Alice, Darling is a powerful, gut-wrenching movie anchored by a career-best performance from Anna Kendrick, with Wunmi Mosaku and Kaniehtiio Horn being equally as good. It’s not an easy film to watch, but one to check out for its vivid acting performances.