I’m not sure how to classify Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s Villains. I watched it during October, so it behooves me to count it as a horror film (I’m aiming for 31 this month), but it’s like … The People Under the Stairs (but with less bite) meets True Romance (but with more sweetness). It’s an odd but workable combo, and its late-2010s aesthetic of bright colors, bubblegum snappiness, and soft edges is nicely complicated by terrific performances, good risk-taking, and genuine commitment. It takes its high-concept premise–“scrappy criminal lovebirds try to rescue a kidnapped child from a house of kitschy horrors”–and wrings everything it can out of it. That means jokes and scares–but Villains takes its character seriously enough for it to mean tragedy, too.
Jules (Maika Monroe) and Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) have knocked over a string of gas stations, and they’ve finally saved up enough for their can’t-fail business venture of selling seashells by the seashore (literally). But since they’re not great at planning ahead, their car runs out of gas while they’re still on their getaway drive. Desperate for another ride, they break into a seemingly empty house and hunt around for some spare keys … or at least a hose to siphon some gas.
Instead, they find a little girl chained up in the basement.
She’s being held there by a wealthy, lovey-dovey power couple–George (Jeffrey Donovan) and Gloria (Kyra Sedgwick)–who soon make their presence known.
Donovan and Sedgwick’s deliciously outsized performances are big enough (and weird enough) to add to the movie’s horror vibes, but one of the pleasures of Villains is that it’s plotted more like a crime movie: improvisational, responsive, and full of plans and consequences. George and Gloria are awful, but they’re not so monstrous–and not so all-powerful–that their methods and motives are clear from the start; it’s possible that Mickey and Jules will be able to get out of this (and take “Sweetiepie” with them) by guile alone. Everyone here, no matter how bizarre, is human-scale, and they think and scheme more like people trying to get away with crimes than like heroes or, well, villains. When the movie goes beyond that, the sense of transcendence feels magnificently earned, like the characters themselves are discovering (and acting on) new depths of feeling, not like the movie is inventing them.
Villains also won my heart by being relatively stingy with its backstory. We learn more about George and Gloria than we do about Mickey and Jules, and that makes sense: George and Gloria are addicted to bullshit self-mythologizing. No one can navel-gaze like a couple of would-be Übermenschen. With Jules, we get one poignant story–and it’s told for a reason, as a way to reach out to another character, not to the audience. Everything else is unsaid and better for it. It’s possible, for example, to look at how Mickey’s reflexive “let’s just stay out of this” stance only hardens into righteous, protective anger after he’s heard George’s smooth-talking sales pitch, or at his play-along appeasement of the sexually voracious Gloria, and come up with some ideas about his background, but they’re just ideas. They make the film more fun to think about; they don’t get in the way of actually watching it. What the movie is (correctly) interested in is what its characters will do next, now that they’ve all come together in this unlikely but volatile collision. The results are sharp, funny, moving, and ceaselessly engaging.
Villains is streaming on Shudder.
