Entertainment
The Director of ‘How to Make a Killing’ Also Directed Aubrey Plaza’s Best Performance
If you’re wondering whether Glen Powell and Margaret Qualley’s underhyped crime thriller How to Make a Killing is going to deliver anything more than hot-people-doing-crimes energy when it hits theaters this weekend, the easiest answer is hiding in director John Patton Ford’s filmography. Specifically, his last feature, a takedown of capitalism that orchestrated one of the most effective on-screen identity shifts of the last decade. He took Aubrey Plaza – long typecast as pop culture’s patron saint of disaffected, deadpanning weirdos – and turned her into something far more unsettling: a bonafide dramatic threat.
That transformation happened in Emily the Criminal, Ford’s lean, nerve-wracking thriller that doubles as the most honest student-loan horror movie ever made. It’s a film where debt is a living thing, a cancer slowly eating away at a person, forcing them to do uncharacteristically terrible (and clinically insane) things. Plaza plays the titular cash-strapped millennial who stops waiting for capitalism to reward her patience and starts testing how much it’ll let her get away with instead. Emily gives her the performance of her career, but it gives us a preview of how wild, ridiculous, and sharply insightful Ford’s storytelling can be. And now’s the perfect time for a re-watch.
Aubrey Plaza Breaks Bad in ‘Emily the Criminal’
When we first meet Emily Benetto in Emily the Criminal, she’s already losing. She’s $70,000 in student debt, locked out of stable employment by a minor assault charge, and stuck cycling through catering gigs where she delivers artisanal salads to tech workers whose salaries probably equal her loan bill. Early on, she bombs a job interview in spectacular fashion, unable to convincingly perform the optimism employers expect. It’s a small scene, but it establishes everything: Emily isn’t failing because she lacks ambition or ability, but because the system is rigged against her.
Her entry into crime happens almost accidentally. A coworker connects her with a low-level fraud ring run by Youcef (Theo Rossi), who recruits financially desperate young people to act as “dummy shoppers.” The job is simple: use a fake credit card to purchase expensive electronics, hand them off, and walk away with a few hundred dollars. Emily’s first attempt is shaky, but when it ends with her walking out of the store with cash in hand anyway, something shifts.
From there, the film turns the WTF meter all the way up to 10. Emily becomes more involved in Youcef’s operation, moving from small retail scams to higher-risk thefts that involve luxury cars and violent confrontations. But nothing deters her, and by the end of this thing, Emily’s become a twisted form of what the system wanted all along: an adaptable, opportunistic, ruthless entrepreneur driven by the bottom line. She is, finally, good at her job.
A Comedy Icon Becomes a Crime Thriller Antiheroine
Before Emily the Criminal, Plaza had perfected a very specific magic trick: making antisocial detachment aspirational. She delivered punchlines like she was doing audiences a favor by participating at all. Her run as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation is still the clearest example of that. April treated every job and every interaction with an authority figure like mildly annoying inconveniences. She openly resented her coworkers, blankly endured small talk, and did it all with such flat calm that it somehow made it even funnier than if she’d pushed for the laugh. Emily the Criminal takes that familiar detachment and, for the first time, treats it as a survival skill instead of a joke.
Plaza plays Emily with blunt practicality. She never pushes you to sympathize with Emily, but she does make you understand how Emily justifies each step of her criminal undertaking. She pays attention. She listens. She adapts. And Plaza plays everything so controlled that you’re always guessing how Emily will handle the next risky grift-gone-wrong. It marks a clear shift in how the actress uses her screen presence. The same deadpan restraint that once made her feel aloof now makes her unpredictable, in the best way. As the film’s director, Ford didn’t create that ability, but he did build a vehicle that allowed her to use it fully.
In How to Make a Killing, you can see Ford playing with the same ideas he explored in Emily the Criminal. His characters don’t suddenly snap into moral gray zones, they slide into them, adjusting their reasoning until things that once seemed unthinkable start to feel like the most obvious choice. Sometimes, committing a crime is the best kind of problem-solving.
The Thread Between Ford’s Films
At least, that’s what Powell’s character believes. He plays Becket Redfellow, a working-class guy from New Jersey with a seriously complicated family history. His mother, Mary, was disowned by her ultra-wealthy upstate New York family when she got pregnant with him. On her deathbed, she tells him one line that drives the whole movie: “Get the life you deserve.” That’s basically Becket’s north star. Fast forward to adulthood, and Becket runs into his childhood crush, Julia (Qualley), who grew up in that same rich world. The reunion stirs something in him, and he starts poking around his family. Long story short: he figures that if he starts bumping off the Redfellow clan, he could end up inheriting the fortune he’s technically owed. It’s a black comedy crime story, but it’s smart about its social commentary. Ford finds ways to layer in critiques of class, capitalism, and the weird ways people justify wanting more than what they have in between the comedic mishaps and half-assed murder plots.
Its tie to Emily the Criminal is that both films are about characters who are pushed into morally gray spaces by circumstance. And in both cases, the thrill comes less from the crime itself and more from watching someone figure out how to survive and manipulate a system that’s stacked against them. Ford gets that. That’s why his work with Plaza was so electric, and why his new film is worth keeping an eye on. He understands that desperation can fuel some pretty fantastic cinematic fireworks.
Emily the Criminal is available to stream on Tubi in the U.S.
Emily the Criminal
- Release Date
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August 12, 2022
- Runtime
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97 Minutes
- Director
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John Patton Ford
- Writers
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John Patton Ford