By skyforbes I went to the movie expecting a Lifetime-styled thriller where mommy Diane Lane tries to save her naive son from the claws of his psychotic bitch of a wife. Turns out the movie wasn't really about this, well a tiny bit of it is, but the movie is very much a political thriller of extremes and how America becomes enraptured by a Far-Right movement called the Change, initiated by a widely successful book written by the Phoebe Dynevor book.
While the film does start as a family thriller where Lane's matriarch clearly resents Dynevor's character for being a fascist loon, the movie then grows from that as the world becomes a Handmaid's Tale kind of place. The son turns into a sadistic dick, the gay daughter is nearly killed by goons and goes on the run, the middle daughter becomes depressed and has an abortion without her husband knowing and the youngest daughter does a lot of sad faces until the shocking finale. And Kyle Chandler has a massive meltdown over a dog's name and Diane Lane rips a flag to shreds,
It's a big ass jumble of threads but I found it daring and watchable and it pulls no tricks. I was shocked by how it ended.
I thought everybody was great but I thought Kyle Chandler, Dylan O'Brien, Madeline Brewer and Phoebe Dynevor were the standouts. I like Diane Lane but she was a tad too one-note for me.