Cinema has had its fair share of everyday girls who can suddenly shift into beast mode when the situation calls for it. Be it Chloë Grace Moretz dropping crooks and C-bombs as Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass to Sharni Vindon cleaning house in You’re Next, there’s something immensely satisfying about watching a character of the “fairer sex” prove that the female is truly deadlier than the male. One of the latest instances of this is Becky, a thriller that sees an angry young girl finally have a place to focus all of that teen frustration and rage when her holiday home is beset by a gang of neo-nazis who have just escaped from jail. However, while parts of Becky sounds like that would have a grungy, exploitation feel to them, we now live in an age where the exact same plots that used to show in grotty grindhouse theatres amsusingly now seem to make up 55% of every arthouse indie thriller looking to make a bloody statement. Take the stage Becky, let’s see what you can do.
While a lot of thirteen year olds have a lot of suppressed rage they can’t seem to expunge in a mature way, Becky Hooper seems to have more than most broiling away within her. Obviously she’s feeling alienated at the vicious, emotional free-for-all we know as high school, but giving her anti-social tendencies an extra boost is the fact that her mother succumbed to cancer a year prior. Of course, a lot of this anger is directed at her well-meaning dad, Jeff, but it seems that her negative feelings toward him fade when he pulls her out of class early to reveal that he’s not going to sell the family’s old lakefront home and that they’re on their way to there right now to spend the weekend. However, Becky’s rare show of jubilation is short lived when Jeff follows up the good news with something of a bombshell when Jeff’s girlfriend Kayla and her young son Ty arrive and Becky is told that they are due to be married soon. Beyond pissed, Becky storms off to her childhood treehouse/fort to brood, rage and have heartbreaking flashbacks of her mother withering away in a hospital bed, but unbeknownst to her, more visitors will soon show up that will make her even more angrier.
After a recent escape from a prison transport van, coldly intelligent neo-nazi Dominick Lewis and his men converge on Jeff’s house in order to reclaim some sort of mysterious property that had been stashed there as some point. However, not only is Dominick having some issues with his acolytes (the humongous Apex is having a crisis of conscience and Sonny and Roman are as thick as pig shit), but his plans certainly didn’t account for finding a mixed race couple living in the place. Soon a tense hostage situation takes place with Jeff, Kayla and her son being held against their will until Dominick finds what he wants; but it turns out that Becky had found it ages before and has it with her as she remains undiscovered in her tree house. Before you can say R-rated Home Alone, it’s neo-nazis vs a thirteen year old girl and it seems that all those reservoirs of untapped rage will soon find an outlet after all…
Becky seems designed to tick all the boxes for your average, modern, indie thriller. It’s shot with a sense of uneasy calm and a disjointed reality that recalls the mumblecore movement of the 2000s, but it also features a familiar actor stretching their range and bursts of savage gore that stands as a deliberately jarring counterpoint to the rather sedate tone. However, while I’ll admit that there is a slight sense of the been there, done that feel to the flick, especially when compared to more overtly ferocious films with a similar premise, directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion manage to find enough cool stuff within the material to make spending nineties minutes in Becky’s company worth your while.
The first is unsurprisingly the eponymos heroine played by Lulu Wilson who carries the film with a pair a huge, soulful eyeballs that can both convey deep hurt, but also can show that she’s a couple of classes short of a school day and can experience a feral rage if pushed. Its to the actress’ credit that she can display all this and still portray the typical angst that being thirteen seems to create even if your life hasn’t been marked by great tragedy; and then furthermore switch between them with minimal dialogue. Yes, she convinces as a moody teen who is having trouble processing her emotions and has issues with her dad, but importantly she also us utterly believable as someone who could stab a man through the throat with a broken ruler or take out an eye in a bezerker rage.
Fairing slightly less well is Kevin James, and while the sight of him stretching his range far beyond the confines of Paul Blart: Mall Cop invokes humourous memories of that Brooklyn 99 joke where Adam Sandler states that he’s cast him as Trotsky in the movie about the Russian revolution he’s writing, there’s a sense that the actor could have done a bit more with his villain. While it’s certainly jarring seeing the King Of Queens shaved bald, heavily bearded and wearing a swastika tattoo the size of a dinner plate on the back of head, he opts not to chew scenery and scream a lot, but he portrays Dominick as such a quiet, subtle, brooding evil that the movie almost swallows him up as simply a form of stunt casting that could have been way more memorable. Faring better in the whole comedic-actor-being-dramatic thing is Joel McHale, who looks suitably frustrated as a father who wants yo move on from grief but is hated by his daughter for doing so, but much like James and his cadre of weirdo henchmen, the film plays things so subtle and underplayed that everyone except Becky seems to fade a little into the background.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe that exactly the style the directors are going for as we remain as disjointed and muted from the real world as Becky is. It would certainly make sense as the team of Milott and Murnion add some nifty stylistic flourishes to the film such an opening scene that juxtaposes Becky’s school life with that of a prison or a moment that sees Becky and Dominick exchanging demands via walkie talkies that’s edited yo make it look like they’re bartering face to face. However, probably the most noticeable aspect of Becky is that despite of its subdued nature, the movie goes full gorehound when it gets the chance as our lead gradually gets the drop on her enemies one by one and anyone who responds to viscera splattering the screen will certainly get their money’s worth – be it eviseration by boat propeller, getting stabbed by a fistful of coloured pencils or having the optic nerve snipped of a dangling eyeball.
While Becky does right by it’s title character and its central vision of a thirteen year old girl splattered with blood and wearing a woolly fox hat is pretty iconic, the rest of the film (bar the gore) struggles to match it. However, while this a quiet, brooding nazi-killing thriller may not be on the level of something like Green Room, it’s got enough of the goods to not play with kids gloves.
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