‘Emily the Criminal’ is Riveting (Until Its Last 5 Mins)
It almost stuck the landing.
Film runtimes have begun to creep higher and higher over the past few years. I no longer bat an eye at movies released in theaters than are two and a half hours or longer. What happened to efficient, great screenwriting that clocked in at under two hours?
Cue Emily the Criminal, prancing into the spotlight at a whopping 1 hour and 35 minutes. I was immediately intrigued.
Emily the Criminal delivers an impressive and immersive storyline with complex characters and meaningful themes while never feeling rushed or filled with gaps. This is such a testament to the stellar screenwriting that serves as the vital foundation for the rest of the film. Emily the Criminal deliciously unravels the way a young woman, Emily (Aubrey Plaza), gets sucked into the world of organized crime and scam enterprises as she struggles with the heavy burdens of hopeless student loan debt and poverty.
There is so much that I loved about Emily the Criminal. It is a model of efficient, highly effective filmmaking constructed by creators who deeply understand the craft. We’ll unpack the aspects of Emily the Criminal that were highly successful and also why the ending of this film left me wanting something different entirely.
Note: spoilers for Emily the Criminal ahead.
Emily’s Relatability
What impressed me about Emily the Criminal is how quickly the film built empathy in us for our main protagonist. From the first few minutes of the movie, she feels like a real person. She feels entirely relatable. Unlike other films where characters feel like constructed personalities, often big, colorful, and larger-than-life, Emily feels grounded in reality.
Throughout the film, we see her face daily struggles in a succession of small, unassuming vignettes of ordinary life moments. This window into the mundane, little moments in Emily’s life actually makes her more relatable, not less. The film is often shot with what looks like a hand-held camera, as if someone right next to her happened to pull out a camcorder to capture her daily, ordinary life. The unassuming nature of Emily living her normal life makes her a compelling protagonist to follow because we can see ourselves in her immediately.
By the time we learn of her struggles drowning in student loan debt, her disrespectful boss, her tedious and tiring job in catering, and her lackluster social life, these only serve to deepen the empathy we already have for Emily. The film efficiently and swiftly sucks us in and gets us onboard for this journey.
Intersecting Storylines
A key source of momentum and tension in Emily the Criminal are the questions that the film poses through our journey with Emily: “How far will Emily go in this criminal underworld? What are the forces at play here?”
We consistently see Emily fight the internal battle within her own mind and her sense of morality in the decisions she makes. We see her desire to pursue a traditional career in a corporate environment, work diligently at her catering job, and follow honest pathways to climb out of the cycle of debt. However, the film also intelligently shows us the oppressive forces at play here as well: utterly disrespectful bosses that treat her with no dignity, the code-switching needed for the flashy advertising job her friend hooks her up with, the grueling labor required from her low-paying minimum wage jobs, and the hopelessness that creeps up and lingers.
The intersecting storylines of Emily’s repeated attempts to pursue the honest path forward and the allure of her new dummy shopper enterprise are woven together incredibly well. Throughout the film, we consistently whip back and forth between these intersecting storylines for Emily, almost as if we, too, are torn between these opposing forces within ourselves. By using these intersecting storylines, the film does a fantastic job depicting the slippery slope of descent into the criminal underworld, an entirely nonlinear path that is accompanied by much doubt and repeated attempts to “go about it the honest way.”
Lackluster Denouement
There is so much to love for the bulk of Emily the Criminal. I was enthralled by this world, this protagonist, and this inner struggle that finally reaches its climax in the final moments of the film. In the major climactic ending scene of this film, Emily chooses to take the money for herself and go on the run, abandoning her lover Youcef (Theo Rossi), who suffers a potentially life-threatening head wound as the police sirens close in on her.
My major issue is with the denouement sequence after this climactic scene, where we see Emily start a new life in a foreign country and begin the identical organized crime scam enterprise that she had learned from Youcef.
Much of this film presented fascinating ideas and commentary on the systems that we create and the cycles of poverty that push people to the point of desperation and hopelessness: the power dynamics in low-paying jobs between management and employees, the workplace conditions for laborers, the isolating culture of corporate jobs, the privilege of unpaid internships that serve as the only pathways into high-paying job markets. These themes and ideas are fascinating to ponder and mull over. Emily was a compelling protagonist and a vehicle for these themes because she was so relatable. She represented an entire subset of the population facing similar struggles and cycles as she did. So when the film ultimately positions her as a criminal through and through, this was a disappointment to me.
Even the title of the film, Emily the Criminal, suggests that Emily’s tenacity, grit, and gifts as a criminal are part of her identity — part of her nature. The denouement sequence of her now leading this criminal organization, after the entire journey and pain and struggle she experienced over the course of the film, suggests that Emily is fulfilling who she was all along. And it’s precisely this inevitability of her nature determining her fate that no longer positions her as one of us but someone set apart from us.
All in all, I loved 90 minutes out of this 95-minute fresh, highly effective thriller film. Emily the Criminal was an absolutely engulfing experience, and it almost stuck the landing.
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