Normal People star deserved a better Hollywood debut than this southern gothic schmaltzer and its outrageously evasive cheat ending
Daisy Edgar-Jones was a lockdown smash for her excellent performance in the BBC’s Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People, and she deserved better for her Hollywood debut than this uncompromisingly terrible southern gothic schmaltzer based on the humungous US bestseller by Delia Owens. It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect. Defending her is David Strathairn as the white-suited decent liberal lawyer and it is at this stage that this film plays like an all-white reboot of To Kill a Mockingbird with Edgar-Jones somehow getting to play Scout and Tom Robinson at the same time.
Daisy Edgar-Jones was a lockdown smash for her excellent performance in the BBC’s Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People, and she deserved better for her Hollywood debut than this uncompromisingly terrible southern gothic schmaltzer based on the humungous US bestseller by Delia Owens. It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect. Defending her is David Strathairn as the white-suited decent liberal lawyer and it is at this stage that this film plays like an all-white reboot of To Kill a Mockingbird with Edgar-Jones somehow getting to play Scout and Tom Robinson at the same time.
- 7/21/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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