A little while ago, Saturday Night Live ran a video by Please Don’t Destroy, its trio of neo-Lonely Island writer nerds, where the guys were hooked on a videogame called Molly Shannon 2K23, an absurdist concept where players use a realistic-looking Molly Shannon (the SNL alum hosting this episode) as their avatar, going about her business as a comedian, actress, and mother. It was a funny sketch, but one that the PDD boys recycled and tweaked from an earlier version they posted on Twitter, where the subject wasn’t Shannon, but Fault in Our Stars and Divergent star Shailene Woodley. Upon seeing the new version, I tried to pinpoint why, exactly, I found the idea of a game where you go into “Woodley Mode” so much funnier than the Molly Shannon version, and landed on the timing. Shailene Woodley had not ceased to be famous in 2021, the year that mini-sketch came out, but she was just removed enough from her former ubiquity to hit the Random Celebrity sweet spot, someone whose anecdote-telling on chat shows would no longer seem especially exciting to her or her fans.
It’s not as if Woodley actually disappeared after her signature YA film series Divergent was left for dead in one of the funniest franchise mishaps in recent film history. (The third book in the trilogy was split into two movies, a la Harry Potter and Twilight—only the third movie flopped, and the fourth movie was canceled after Woodley made it clear that no, the studio’s plan to wrap it all up with a TV movie was not of interest to her.) She made a bunch of smart, sensible post-YA career moves: Taking a role opposite multiple superstars in HBO’s half-acclaimed Big Little Lies (half, because you may have forgotten there was a second season), co-starring in the Netflix romance The Last Letter from Your Lover for director Augustine Frizzell, and not hurriedly signing up for any big-ticket tentpole movies likely to drown out her empathetic sensitivity. Now, due to release-date vagaries, she has two new movies available on VOD simultaneously—which somehow have filed to garner more than a whisper of buzz. But To Catch a Killer and Robots are both compelling for how they transfuse Woodley’s previously emo leanings into more adult roles.
In both her grounded YA adaptations The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars, as well as those stupid Divergent movies, Woodley has an emotional openness that lends otherwise potentially saintly characters a no-nonsense directness. She has an unflinching quality that plays well against the showboating of actors like Miles Teller. It can also render that mid-2000s career standby of a de facto Disney princess exploring her dark side (see the financially obscure yet weirdly famous likes of 2005’s Havoc, with Anne Hathaway, or 2007’s I Know Who Killed Me, with Lindsay Lohan) thankfully obsolete; there’s no princess-level purity to even Woodley’s sweetest-natured characters. So it’s not exactly that the semi-raunchy sci-fi comedy Robots, the kind of movie that would probably describe itself as an “anti-romantic comedy” because it uses the c-word a few times, exposes a new wide of Woodley’s persona. It does, however, give her an atypical role: a proudly conniving golddigger who woos men into lavishing her with expensive gifts, then sends in her robotic double to seal the deal with sexual favors.
The movie is set in a world where robotic labor is common, but robotic doubles that more closely resemble specific humans are outlawed, probably for the exact reasons Woodley’s character Elaine prizes her black-market acquisition. Similarly attached to his own illegal double is Charles (Jack Whitehall), who uses the robot for a mirror-image process: He meets women as himself, sends the unfailingly polite and patient double on dates with them until they’re ready for sex, and then swaps himself back in for the fun part. There’s a neat screwball energy to the obvious yet satisfying intersection that ensues: Following an address mix-up, the Charles robot winds up having sex with the Elaine robot, and the two doubles fall in love and run away together. The two humans, then, must team up to retrieve their wayward (and, again, very illegal) property.
The movie’s plotting is vastly more clever than its dialogue or jokes, which are mostly dire. (One good sight gag: Elaine’s collection of expensive limited-edition purses in a variety of ridiculous shapes.) But it’s easy to stick with the movie, not even because Woodley and Whitehall are giving particularly great performances; just because it’s fun to watch disagreeable people soften into mutual affection, and novel to see Woodley play someone selfish and trashy. Her past romances have started from more earnest vantage points, and while she’s not (based on this evidence) an Anna Faris-level comedienne, she seems to have fun playing an avaricious manipulator.
If Robots is a more faux-misanthropic flipside to the youthful love stories of Woodley’s past, To Catch a Killer feels more genuinely removed from her wheelhouse. She plays Eleanor, a Baltimore cop who lucks into a grim career break when her analytical skills catch the eye of Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn), an FBI agent hunting a serial killer. What gives the movie a queasy, vaguely ill-advised currency is that their quarry kills via mass-shooting events, rather than ornate ’90s-style horror-movie clue-trailing—and what gives Woodley’s performance an unusual shade is that she feels an unusually strong understanding, maybe even some psychological kinship, with the loner’s mindset. (The project was originally titled Misanthrope.)
I know, I know: cop and killer! Different sides of the same coin! As Charlie Kaufman once said: See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this. Much of To Catch a Killer is, in fact, a ’90s-style cop/killer thriller with Fincher influence that the filmmakers would probably classify as Zodiac-ish but I’d say is closer to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (still: that makes this a great-looking movie either way). But Woodley’s odd fit in a role that might have once gone to Angelina Jolie or Diane Lane makes it more compelling, not less. To the extent that Woodley has a well-known persona—and she may not, given how efficiently any given Divergent movie can be erased from the consciousness—the movie resists it, walling off her sense of empathy so she can play someone prickly and alienated. Her star-pupil seriousness becomes a little unnerving, and makes To Catch a Killer a more effective procedural as a result. It’s a clinical study of the kind of empathy that comes so easily to her other characters.
Neither Robots nor To Catch a Killer seems poised to do much for Woodley’s career; this one-two punch didn’t garner nearly as much publicity as questions over her former partner Aaron Rodgers’ vaccination status. They’re also a sure sign that the Divergent disaster isn’t going to define her work as she grows older; suddenly, Woodley seems like the kind of performer who might welcome the opportunity to play grown-up or middle-aged characters, rather than putting off the process for as long as possible. In both of her new films, her characters are visibly uncomfortable in the adult world while not appearing to pine for their bygone youth, either. They’re just trying to protect themselves and get by, redefining Woodley Mode.
Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned