Review: 'I Care A Lot' Dark, Too Real, but Fun

There is no such thing as a victimless crime, but there is such a thing as the perfect crime. In "I Care A Lot," Marla Grayson, played with serial killer chill by Rosamund Pike, cares for the elderly. She's set up an entire enterprise to rescue and then disenfranchise rich, aged loners. By picking her marks one by one in reasonable quantities, she executes legal grifts as soon as she can eliminate all of the target's freedoms. She's generous to her associates, as well as seasoned enough to be aware of nearly all of the potential setbacks that could come her way.

The real obstacle to Marla's payday is not just the people protecting the money, but the people just doing their jobs and, of course, the people who think they own the money. Ownership of money is a right for those rich enough to pay the right people to protect it. "At all costs" means at all costs. I think, around the time this film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, America was in the early pandemic. I was not ready to believe that a crime so inhumane, what amounts to imprisonment for the crime of being old and having anything worth stealing, could be realistic.

A plot this darkly humorous will still play out in a post-pandemic America, and it seems less rooted in the fiction genre than in true crime. The intersection of ableism and ageism on display seems pedestrian against the way that the American government murdered as many old people as possible simply by deciding not to spend resources. Violence is not just a man with a gun; sometimes it is a woman who recognizes their actions will harm you, and that is the desired effect. Once you can move past the horror of those inhumane sentiments, this movie is almost fun.

Queer-coded villains are not new territory, but Marla's romantic relationship with Francine is one of the only humanizing pieces of her personality on display. It is still sadly novel to see a queer couple onscreen without any hint of a coming out story, where they aren't hiding who they are, where literally almost every person who encounters Marla and Francine onscreen fundamentally understands that these two are basically married, a package deal, and definitely should be murdered one after the other.

As a thriller that shifts through expositions quickly into reversals of fate, heart-pounding escapes and deadly negotiations, the film's changes in tone don't upset the pacing. With some scenes filmed in Massachusetts, New England theatre fans can enjoy Celeste Oliva's neat cameo where she gets to effortlessly chew on the scenery. To be fair, Dianne West as Jennifer Peterson, Marla's main victim, as well as Peter Dinklage and Chris Messina, also eat up entire scenes even with simple shrugs and smiles. They give us the kind of smiles that show a lot of teeth and not a lot of heart.

"I Care A Lot" premieres on Netflix Feb. 19