Netflix And Chill: Emily The Criminal (2022)

Although I like her onscreen presence, and although she tends to pick a variety of interesting projects, Aubrey Plaza being in a movie isn't ever a guarantee that I will enjoy it. That seems to be changing though, especially in the movies that also have her serving in some kind of producer role, and Emily The Criminal is one of her best roles yet.

A feature debut from writer-director John Patton Ford, this is the tale of a young woman who struggles to get a decent break in life. She is weighed down by mistakes in her past, including a felony charge and a whole lot of student loan debt, but she knows that the current system is making things much harder than they need to be. Eventually offered the chance to make a quick $200 in a credit card scam, Emily sees a way to massively improve her life. The scam is overseen by Youcef (Theo Rossi), who ends up teaching Emily more and more ways to improve her profit-making opportunities. But with greater reward comes greater risks, of course.

While I went into this expecting a decent little character study, from the title and the marketing of the movie, I soon realised that it was interested in offering a bit more than that. Emily The Criminal IS all about Emily, and her new-found talent for some criminal activities, but it's also a reminder of just how badly the system works against people who struggle and sweat through years to make up for the ongoing repercussions of past mistakes. Although it won't happen to everyone, many people will have made one or two mistakes in their youth that lands them in trouble with the police, and even more people will end up in some kind of debt (planned or unplanned) at least once. Emily The Criminal shows how hard it is to move away from those things, especially in a society that has now seemingly stacked the odds in favour of employers who want to make use of unpaid interns, employees trapped by the need to keep working all hours of the day to make the most of their low wage, and the apparently blissful move towards a "gig economy". That last part was meant to be completely sarcastic, by the way.

Ford packs a lot of great little moments into the 97-minute runtime, whether it's showing us Emily attending a job interview being conducted by someone trying to blindside her with information about her past, the tense transactions where Emily wants her fraud to go undetected until she is away from the shop/seller/buyer, or a fantastic exchange between our lead and a powerful employer (Gina Gershon) who thinks she is doing someone a huge favour by offering them, well, something that isn't a huge favour.

Plaza is excellent in her role, adding a tooughness and determination to her usual constant eye-rolling at the awfulness of the world and people around her. It's arguably the best role she's had in a long time, and she sinks her teeth into it with vigour. Rossi is also great in the role of Youcef, a young man who ends up running a successful crime scene without having to be the typically brutal and unfeeling crime boss. The real sense of menace comes from Youcef's partner/cousin, Khalil, and Jonathan Avigdori does very well with that character. Gershon tries hard to steal her one scene, and it's a great back and forth with Plaza there, and there is also excellent support from Megalyn Echikunwoke (a friend, arguably), Bernardo Badillo (a colleague who leads Emily to her new "career opportunity"), as well as Craig Stark, Sarah Allyn Bauer, and everyone else helping to make the onscreen world feel busier and more realistic than it actually is.

I'm not sure if this will win over anyone yet to come around to Plaza, she's an acquired taste and some just won't ever take to the various shades of her standard onscreen persona, but it's certainly a film that I recommend everyone makes time for. Some will view it as a justification of criminals committing crimes. I view it as a condemnation of a society that doesn't do anything more than give lip service to the ideas of rehabilitation, self-care, and self-improvement.

9/10

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