Now available to rent or purchase on VOD services like Prime Video, Emily the Criminal is a remarkable point on the arc of Aubrey Plaza’s career. We likely first recognized her in Parks and Recreation or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, cocked an eyebrow at Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever (she was the voice!), realized she was far funnier than Dirty Grandpa and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates deserved, and watched with fascination as she explored darker, more complicated characters in indie dramas Ingrid Goes West and Black Bear. Now she’s in nearly every shot of Emily the Criminal, a microdrama fueled by Millennial disillusionment, and it’s not an eye-opener, because we pretty much knew she could anchor a heavy ship like this – it’s more of an eye-widener, and her best vehicle yet.
EMILY THE CRIMINAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: An older white guy interviews Emily (Plaza) for a job – something to do with keeping hospital records. He says he hasn’t run a background check, and asks if she has anything on her criminal record. A DUI, she says, a youthful mistake. He then pulls out the background check detailing an aggravated assault conviction. Who caught who in a lie? We can’t help but empathize with Emily – he fibbed first. Entrapped her with a duplicitous, demeaning, condescending power move. She walks out, but gives him a piece of her mind first. We’ll eventually learn she isn’t one to let someone else have the final word.
When did the assault happen? Recently? A few years ago? Several years? Several, it seems. The details are sketchy, but it seems to have derailed her life. She lives in Los Angeles, working a backbreaking “independent contractor” job delivering food for a catering company. She shares a small apartment with annoying roommates. She has $70,000 in student loan debt. She sketches portraits of people on the street in her sketchpad – the remnants of her artistic aspirations. Her longtime friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) has a cush gig at an ad agency, and she makes vague promises to Emily about getting her an interview in the design department. Emily and Liz meet for a drink, and one drink turns into them snorting powder in the bathroom and peeling themselves off the sidewalk.
A co-worker gives Emily a phone number – a hookup for a gig where she can make $200 in an hour. She follows the lead to a shady warehouse where she’s given a fake ID and a stolen credit card. She buys a $2,000 TV from a big-box store, hands it over to the bosses and gets cash in an envelope. One of the guys running this operation is Youcef (Theo Rossi), who’s nice while his cousin and business partner is brusque and rude. Is that a spark of attraction between Emily and Youcef? I’d say so. What can she do next? Take this burner phone, come back tomorrow, and the payday will be $2,000. This time, she’s buying a BMW from a car lot that looks to be, shall we say, non-corporate. She has eight minutes to get out of there before they realize the credit card is fraudulent and she doesn’t make it and the guy attacks her and she peels out of there with the BMW and he chases her and she stops and pepper-sprays the guy and drives off and gets away and has an anxiety attack. But she got the job done. Like I said, she isn’t one to let someone else have the final word.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Besides a few moments of screw-twisting tension that recall Good Time or a Jeremy Saulnier movie, it’s a tight descent-into-darkness character study along the lines of Rebecca Hall in Christine or Robin Williams in One Hour Photo.
Performance Worth Watching: Plaza revels in the moral ambiguities of this character, and the vulnerability of her performance has us following her down a slippery slope of justification and righteous entitlement. Aside from a couple of typically destructive deadpan-comic line readings, it’s her most traditionally dramatic role, and she executes it with .
Memorable Dialogue: “Sorry, how much interest is being added a month?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Plaza and first-time feature writer/director John Patton Ford are a potent team. Emily the Criminal gives us a character who’s tried and tried and tried to play the capitalism game, and realized the rules are rigged in the system’s favor. She’s working her way through the student-loan scam, the unpaid-internship scam, the gig-economy scam and the one-strike-and-you’re-screwed scam, and it’s about time she scammed it back. Think about it: Identity theft is less likely to hurt an individual and more likely to hurt a big bank (that can absorb many, many more relatively tiny financial hits). Emily finds it empowering to punch back. Her situation is such that we’re almost inclined to believe that credit card fraud isn’t such a bad idea. It’s like Robin Hood robbing the rich and giving to the poor; it has the allure of punk rock.
Of course, there’s also the question of that one strike against Emily. What exactly happened there? We’re not privy to that. We also see her tendencies to party hard and escalate situations instead of accepting defeat. It all points at her getting a thrill out of subverting the law and flirting with danger; this stuff lurks in the margins of Plaza’s performance (which brings to mind Bryan Cranston’s in Breaking Bad, but to a more succinct degree), and plays out during sequences of intense, dangerous, nerve-frazzling suspense, which Emily bounces back from with surprising what-doesn’t-kill-me-only-makes-me-stronger energy. The film more strongly emphasizes how late-stage capitalism sows disillusionment in the American dream, and creates reactionaries and criminals. It’s not a subtle statement, but in Ford and Plaza’s hands, it’s a potent one.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Plaza is great here. Can’t wait to see what she does in Coppola’s Megalopolis – and on and beyond that.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.