I Care a Lot
First screened and reviewed in July 2025
Director: J Blakeson. Cast: Rosamund Pike, Eiza González, Peter Dinklage, Dianne Wiest, Chris Messina, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Nicholas Logan, Damian Young, Macon Blair, Alicia Witt, Celeste Oliva, Moira Driscoll. Screenplay: J Blakeson. In Brief:
Doesn't just leave a sour taste: it's made of sour taste. Maybe began as daring satire. Now mostly a slog in cruelty.
VOR:②
More popular storytelling ought to take aim at the barbarism of U.S. elder care and the shark economy. Glimmer of courage here is soon doused.
Jesus. If you're going to make a movie about cynicism and misanthropy, maybe don't make an openly cynical, misanthropic film? Even the lighting, the music, the wig are cruel. Also, if one of your topics is the way people and systems tie themselves into knots to justify plainly fishy schemes and bad behavior, maybe don't tie your film into fishy knots of all kinds to get us on side with a plainly bad character? And in ways that suggest you lack a lot of basic story sense and were never in it for the social critique as much as the gimmicky, genre-hopping, patience-testing chicanery?
Speaking of games of twister, I can pretty easily talk myself into a case by which writer-director J Blakeson, of the skin-crawling Disappearance of Alice Creed, may have defended his logic for this film that only seems morally wayward (presenting a reprehensible protagonist only to surround her with "even worse" people so we can watch her show some fearsome mettle). He may well believe he is going to great lengths to analogize the industry of elder-care guardians to the Russian mafia while appearing to set them against each other. And he may lean heavily on the logic of the closing scenes to reframe sharply whatever accusations we've been lobbing at the previous hour, or the previous two. But it's asking a lot to write off so much of this hard-surface, tonally iffy, unevenly acted story as a false flag for its "real" message. And while I whole-heartedly believe that film critics ought to pause a while to entertain alternatives to our own assumptions and reflex value judgments—at least entertaining where the artists might plausibly, even productively coming from, even if we'd never have come from that place, and felt instinctually put off by what we were presented—there is such a thing as rationalizing too much on behalf of a film that looks, smells, and acts like a rat so much of the time. And increasingly so.
Also, that's the best title they could come up with?
P.S. I'm not convinced that the "even worse" people are even worse than our lead, such as she is. Though again, the movie may agree with me. Sort of. Incoherently. Whatever.
