Who doesn’t love a good story about a woman trying to kill her shitty, good-for-nothing, cheating husband? Over the years, some excellent stories have been told about the feminine urge to take control of your own life, from Jennifer Lopez’s Enough to The Chicks’ classic “Goodbye Earl” to the modern pinnacle of “good for her” fiction, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. When that movie came out, you could sense a change in the air: it might not be immediately apparent, but from that point, similar narratives would need to try very hard to dispel the influence of Gone Girl, with some (like Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman) simply leaning in, reveling in the joys of women’s wrongs.
Guillem Morales’ The Wasp, based on the play of the same name by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, really, really wants to be Gone Girl, but doesn’t understand what made Flynn’s story and Fincher’s adaptation work. The premise of The Wasp is very simple: as teen girls, Carla and Heather find a pigeon with a broken wing, which Carla puts out of its misery with a rock. Twenty years later, Heather (Naomie Harris) — believing her childhood friend’s violence to be a sign that she’s desensitized to grisly bloodshed — hires Carla (Natalie Dormer) to kill her husband. Why? Well, because he’s been carrying on an online affair for two years — with a fake profile created by Heather.
Does that sound convoluted to you? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Without giving too much away, the twists and turns of The Wasp are constant right up until its bloody climax. It’s hard to ignore that it feels like most of them were written without consideration for whether they added anything to the story. The coincidences feel forced, Heather’s gambit seemingly built on dry sand. Heather and Carla are united in the sexual violence and abuse they’ve suffered, but the way these cruelties are rolled out over the course of The Wasp feels lazy at best, and irresponsible at worst.
It doesn’t help that Harris and Dormer’s performances feel bizarre, at best. While Harris leans into the inherent hamminess of being a woman plotting to murder the man doing a half-version of “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” with her, Dormer never seems to ascend past the “bitter ex-friend with a tough life” trope that she brings to every line of dialogue. We see further evidence of Carla’s supposed cruelty in more flashbacks, but Dormer’s performance is so flat that it’s hard to believe Carla could be capable of such malice.
The Wasp wants to be good and clever — and you can imagine a lot of this working better with the limitations imposed by a stage production — but so many moments fall prey to the “tell, not show” trap; in one scene, Heather explains the MO of the titular insect (specifically, the tarantula hawk), and you can almost sense Harris fighting the urge look directly at the camera and say, “IT’S A METAPHOR!!!”
At times, The Wasp feels like it could be the sort of movie that might lean into the clunkiness enough to pass it off as satirical, even “campy,” but Morales doesn’t seem to know what the tone should be. Is it a pitch-black drama? Is it a dark comedy? Is there a hint of satire in there? The Wasp isn’t confident enough to be clear, but you do get the sense that it was created out of a desire to make something “dark and gritty.” When it allows its characters to make jokes or be unhinged, it feels artless, like remnants of a more balanced movie that somehow made it into the final cut. Even when we get the irony of a woman whose husband is cheating on her declaring, “In my world, men respect women!” it lands with a dull thud.
It’s a shame, because you can really see the movie working with a more confident director or in the hands of a cinematographer with any interest in keeping the film from feeling like an obvious adaptation of a play. The flashbacks to the duo’s school years feel slightly more alive, but the flatness of the scenes between them in Heather’s house bleed any accumulated charm out of the piece. If you’re a fan of the “good for her” style movie, there are most certainly worse options out there, but, really, you’d be better off watching one of those, because at least its mediocrity might be a little more fun.
Photo courtesy of Shout! Studios
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