Tremendous film; both in its style and its substance. Its snide humor and intrinsically violent catharsis made it both devilishly pleasant and sickeningly repulsive. The hard hearted and nauseating thrust of this film is the puss filled blister ready to pop underneath the pressure of the impending awful. Mulligan is masterfully clever, steely intense, and perniciously charming.You ache for what she has gone though, dread what she must deal, and battle within you as to what must be done; but there are fewer characters that are easier to get behind.
Mulligan is immersive and corrosive and subversively eruptive. She is confident, vulnerable, and nimbly droll in her acting. This film is a cinematic chariot bringing Mulligan’s ample skills to your lap, as emotions delicately dance across her face and she masterfully brings her thoughts to your brain without speaking.
There are some on-the-nose story bits and scenery elements, but this feels so fresh and timely that I was absorbed. The quirk of the underlying layer of the film was the fashionable primer upon which the weights are painted. The “Make Me” Cafe, the intensely deliberate little pink house in which she lives, and the multicolored nails provide those subtle elements that embody the stunted and sickeningly sweet underlay. She so often is placed in these innocent images, big juicy red apples, but there are rancid worms slithering behind the skin.
This film had just enough sardonic jabs and slaps that we as the audience can sustain the true battle; one of compelling horror and crushing pain. A society’s shame and abhorrence, right in front of us where it needs to be seen, and the exigent force of some semblance of justice trapping those vile tentacles of the accepted horrors in their ignominy. Poignant, somewhat playful, and deserved pay back; all gratifying.
