In this Netflix original’s initial 20 minutes, writer/director J Blakeson and star Rosamund Pike craft one of cinema’s all-time, audaciously evil characters.
Pike’s Marla Grayson isn’t merely malevolent; she’s smug, self-satisfied, shark-like and insufferably condescending. Think Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched, from 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but with naked avarice and ambition added to the mix.
Dragged from her home by the force of a court order, Jennifer (Dianne Wiest, center)
becomes increasingly suspicious of the "benevolent" attitude displayed by Fran
(Eiza González, left) and Marla (Rosamund Pike).
Marla’s plastic smile is so insincere, so unbearably patronizing, that you want to reach into the screen and throttle her.
She’s one of the best-scripted villains ever concocted, and Pike brings her to terrifying life. Every little detail — every nuanced bit of dialogue, every self-righteous smirk — is exquisitely calculated.
Marla’s behavior — her very existence — is nightmarish. We pray never to encounter her like, in real life.
She unapologetically reveals her moral bankruptcy early on, via voice-over. “There are two kinds of people in this world,” she insists, matter-of-factly, “those who take … and those who get took.”
Marla has built an appallingly successful career as a professional, court-appointed guardian for dozens of elderly wards deemed “incapable of caring for themselves,” and therefore railroaded into managed-care facilities. Once barricaded and helpless behind locked glass doors, Marla and her business partner/lover Fran (Eiza González) seize, strip and sell each victim’s assets via dubious but wholly legal means.
As the film begins, the son of one such casualty — Macon Blair, as the hapless and frustrated Feldstrom — understandably goes berserk when he’s refused access to his elderly mother. It’s a disastrous move, which the oh-so-cool-and-collected Marla later references before court Judge Lomax (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), since it proves that Feldstrom poses a “clear and present danger” to his mother.
It only gets worse.
Marla has two additional key players on her corrupt payroll: smarmy Sam Rice (Damian Young), director of her favorite managed-care prison, who’ll adjust meds and treatment to her desires; and chirpy Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), who proposes likely candidates from her patient roster.
Her newest suggestion is Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a wealthy retiree who lives alone and is without family: therefore a “cherry,” in Marla’s cold analysis.
