Becky (2020) - Movie Review

Any time an R18+ film comes out over here is cause for celebration, far as I’m concerned; it’s like finding a Shiny in the wild. And this one certainly earns that rating with its depiction of a young teenager waging bloody war against a gang of Neo-Nazis who invade her home. But more than anything that visceral, this film is a joy to watch because it shows its directors, Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, at the top of their game.

Those names may not mean much, given I haven’t drawn that much attention to them in the past, but we’ve actually looked at their work twice before on here. They were the duo behind the zom-com Cooties (whose supporting performance from Leigh Whannell still gives me the giggles almost five years later) and the action-thriller Bushwick (where the soundtrack served more interesting than the actual story), both of which I can group together as examples of directors doing their best with less-than-ideal scripts. And admittedly, there’s a bit of that to be found here too. Dominick (Kevin James)’s ultimate reason for invading this particular house is wire-thin, and a lot of the motivation from the villains amounts to hunting for a MacGuffin.

Then again, teenager attacking Nazis; don’t really need that strong of a premise to sell that, although just about everyone onboard is doing their best to do so. Greta Zozula’s cinematography here contains some of the strongest visuals I’ve seen all year, starting off on a major note by juxtaposing a prison yard throwdown with a school yard throwdown and advancing from there to show a pretty unnerving parallel between the heroine and villain. There’s also the gore on display, which is morbidly delightful to watch in full effect, seeing our heroine use kids’ art supplies, a super soaker, and a lawnmower to do some pretty gruesome things.

The acting pedigree adds a lot to the overall effect too, starting with Lulu Wilson in the lead. Through her work with Mike Flanagan, she’s shown plenty of aptitude with psycho-supernatural horror (that, and making for one of the creepiest kids ever in Ouija: Origin Of Evil), and she takes to the fight scenes here with equal panache. She seriously makes the zombies in Cooties look like regular schoolkids with how bloodthirsty and vengeful she gets.

Opposite her is James as the lead Neo-Nazi, who may not be as intimidating as the role calls for, but more than makes up for that by selling just about every other aspect of the character. The fascist rhetoric, the father-like command he has for the rest of his gang, the cold calculation behind setting up the invasion itself (vague goal notwithstanding); his usually affable charisma gets twisted into the kind of character who regularly convinces people to kill children, and it’s a little too believable. There’s also Joel McHale as a rare male fridging victim, Amanda Brugel who gets some of the better one-liners as McHale's fiancée, and Robert Maillet in a weirdly complex role as Dominick’s right-hand man, but ultimately, it’s all about James and Wilson.

And in their conflict, the film manages to say quite a lot about the effect violence has on people, both child and adult, without really saying that much in the dialogue. Maillet’s Apex is as direct as the film gets concerning that effect, and even then, his character arc ends on… well, calling it ‘satisfying’ feels a little perverse, but that doesn’t make the resolution any less hilarious. Kind of like the scene where one of the convicts has to get his eye cut off, come to think of it.

Regardless, whatever deficiencies exist in the script as far as why everyone is in attendance, it makes up for by diving into the effect being here has on them, Wilson as the titular Becky in particular. It’s an incredibly difficult feat to make a film that’s this violent, this bloody, and this wholly unrepentant in how much it shows of both of those things, and yet effectively deliver a message about the psychological trauma that that much bloodshed can have. By film’s end, as much as I giggled and hollered at the carnage on-screen as it happened, I felt a rather large pit opening in my stomach, thinking of what Becky had to do and what she became in order to survive.

 

Ordinarily, I’d get a lot more hung-up on the writing issues here, but that’s just how good the direction is if it can make up for that. Third time truly is the charm for Milott and Murnion, who make any existing sticking points in the script a non-issue thanks to how amazingly the acting, visuals, soundtrack (between Nima Fakhrara’s noisy compositions and a solid needle drop for Aesop Rock’s Supercell) and under-the-surface theming work together to make for one hell of a bloody ride.