Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the virtual 2022 Sundance Film Festival. With the film’s wider availability this week, we’ve republished the review. Check out all our coverage from Sundance here, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
In some ways, John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal is the kind of movie everyone wants to make they might make when they’re starting out in the film industry. You already have internalized that you’re probably not gonna be Welles and come out of the gate throwing heaters, but you do want to make a good movie, one that shows off your skills as a storyteller and craftsman. While Ford doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel of the small-scale crime thriller (or neo-noir, or whatever euphemism you wish to use), he has put together a solid little picture, anchored by swell performances from Aubrey Plaza and Theo Rossi and spiced up by a sense of genuine generational angst that feels semi-unique to this film.
We first meet Emily when she’s in the middle of a job interview that, at first blush, seems to be fairly typical yet slowly heads to something more sadistic and sinister. The normal questions about one’s past and experience and/or gaps in their resume give way to, in Emily’s case, a discussion of her criminal record. She’s a felon, having been convicted of causing an accident while driving drunk, the most serious among a few other small charges, and Emily quickly resents this line of questioning — it’s clear that the manager already has all of the information about her background on file and is simply making her repeat to him events he already knows all of the details of — and gets into a huff and storms out. Another door closes itself to her, and while all of her friends and classmates seem to be waltzing through the gates leading to self-security and building of moderate amounts of wealth, she’s stuck with student loans, a tiny room in an apartment she shares with a family, and dogshit catering job, where the employer frequently makes references to the fact that she’s an at-will employee and, thus, has no protection whatsoever.
However, a window into a new world opens itself up when, as thanks for babysitting one of his children in an emergency, a co-worker gives Emily the number for a local “business,” where she can make $200 in an hour. She arrives at the warehouse and is scanned over by one of the owners, a domineering would-be Lebanese mafioso, before she’s allowed into the secrets of what exactly this enterprise does. Basically, as Yousef (Theo Rossi), the other and kind-seeming owner tells her, they commit credit card fraud: They need bodies to carry in freshly-purchased and printed credit cards to big box stores and use them to buy goods, like televisions, that they can later re-sell. They’ve got fakes for the cons in case they get asked for IDs by the clerks, and provided you don’t hit the same store twice in the same week, it’s a pretty lucrative gig. Emily nearly storms out when she hears this — she’s got priors, after all — but she needs the money too much. As it goes, her first job with them goes off without a hitch, and she’s invited back by Youcef for a job that’ll pay $2,000, as long as she’s able to get away without getting killed.
So begins Emily’s full descent into the world of fraud and part-time crime, which only escalates as the paydays grow and as her relationship with Yousef blossoms into something more than just a standard partners-in-crime affair. Yousef has honest-to-Christ dreams: Home ownership, stability, to provide, but he can’t quite get out of his brother’s shadow, a domineering force who controls his every move and goes out of his way to ensure that the younger sibling knows his place. It’s a credit to Plaza and Rossi that they make this fast-forming relationship feel genuine — scenes of the pair of them provoking each other into sharing their hopes for the future coupled with the genuine small interactions that make on-screen relationships seem honest to the eye (a dinner date with Yousef’s mother is another highlight) go a long way to getting one to care about what happens to them. It’s great to see Plaza putting her talents as a dramatic performer here, and given that she tends to oscillate between the understated (Parks and Rec, etc.) and the exaggerated (Legion) in most of her work, the pairing of her brusque manner with this particular character, aggrieved and often using her seriousness to hide just how out-of-her-depth she is in this world, is a swell one.
That said, beyond the performances themselves, there’s very little that Emily the Criminal brings to the small-scale crime thriller that one hasn’t seen before. There’s plenty of Mann in the mixture here, though perhaps not stylistically: I thought often of his writing for Straight Time, which articulated a similar strain of one’s frustration when they’re trying to move on from a past that, because of societal biases, they can’t quite escape. The biggest addition might simply be the addition of a certain brand of immensely-relatable millennial aggreviedness: Unpaid internships, the insults hurled at one’s struggles by high-paid and established boomers, the lack of security and stability coupled by massive amounts of debt. It’s occasionally a little less than as subtle as one would hope for, but it’s still an interesting and unstable element tossed into a generic mixture. Regardless, Ford has crafted a sturdy little thriller, well-constructed and executed even if it might not be as notable as one might hope for, offering a compelling character study within the confines of its genre trappings. And, hey, it’s always fun to see a car chase in a Sundance movie.