Two British women, one affluent and childless, the other impoverished and seven months pregnant with a brood already at home, reconnect after decades, having once been childhood friends. The wealthy woman, Heather (Naomie Harris), claims that she always admired the way her former schoolmate Carla (Natalie Dormer) acted so decisively and was able to channel the rage of living in an abusive home into action, most memorably smashing an injured pigeon with a rock to “put it out of its misery.” Now in her 40s, Heather is mired in a loveless, allegedly abusive, marriage and will go to “any length” to be free of her husband; she has the resources but lacks the resolve. Whereas Carla, who’s on the precipice of financial ruin and is reduced to sneaking out at night to turn tricks even while visibly “in the family way,” seems like exactly the sort of desperate person who might be compelled to get their hands dirty and kill someone in exchange for a satchel full of money. Reluctantly, a bargain is struck, a plan is set in motion.
It’s the sort of premise that Hitchcock might have made hay out of, and, indeed, during its early scenes The Wasp, from director Guillem Morales (Julia’s Eyes), at least nods at being something akin to Strangers on a Train for the social media era. There’s a chewy subtext to Heather’s assumptions about Carla, largely gleaned from anonymously stalking her Facebook, with the inference being she’s reached out to the only poor person she knows whose only real qualification for committing a murder is the absence of better options (mercy killing a small animal when she was barely an adolescent is hardly proof of anything). Heather appears to be treating the entire endeavor with the same level of seriousness that she might hiring a cleaning woman, and Carla’s annoyance at even being considered for this sort of thing is understandable and conveyed honestly by Dormer (credibly glammed down and using a working class accent). Alas, The Wasp has more on its mind, and Heather’s seemingly blinkered behavior, as well as the film’s rather astonishing gaps in logic, are all part of its grand design; an orchestrated bit of subterfuge and an almost The Count of Monte Cristo-like tale of vengeance decades in the making. Not coincidentally, it also contains during its end credits the four most cursed words in all of cinema: “based on the play.”
After seeding the scheme across clandestine meetings and over text messages, the film relocates to Heather’s well-kept (save for a nasty wasp’s nest above the kitchen ceiling that Heather rashly liberates in a fit of pique) suburban home where the two woman plot out a murder disguised as a robbery gone wrong that will provide both of them an alibi. And that’s where the film remains for the duration of its runtime as what already had the shape of a two-hander becomes a two-hander localized to a single room, with the film’s attempts to “open itself up” limited to expository flashbacks that expand on the exact nature of Heather and Carla’s falling out as children. As the two women converse it becomes apparent that Heather is not quite the babe in the woods that she presents herself to be — Harris’ flustered bubbliness eventually giving way to a chilly directness — and Carla’s role in all this can no longer be attributed to happenstance. And the more the film expands upon the shared history between the two women, the more preposterous The Wasp becomes, with the entire rickety house of cards collapsing in on itself under the weight of its contrivances. What might have been chalked up as regrettable oversights on the part of the film (if the word “divorce” is ever spoken aloud, it’s fleeting) are revealed to be concerted choices. And inane ones.
Working from a screenplay by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, based on her own play, The Wasp arrives with many of the telltale signs of a stage-to-screen adaptation: aside from the stray split-diopter shot, it’s visually functional, feels confined (as opposed the more constructive “claustrophobic”), and tends to explicate most of its ideas in long, meaty speeches dependent on actorly fireworks. For instance, the film features multiple animals as tortured metaphors: both the wounded bird that needs someone to violently end its suffering as well as the title insect, which we learn in a monologue by Harris hunts and torments larger predators before laying its eggs in them as a host (“bit like being pregnant,” Carla offers up, really underlining the point). Almost the entire second half of the film finds the two women relitigating the traumas of their childhood; those inflicted on Carla by her father, which she, in turn, transferred onto her one-time friend, Heather. It’s a fine showcase for both actresses that’s undermined by some fairly dubious dramaturgy — Dormer’s genuine confusion at what Harris is even going on about 30 years later is undercut by flashbacks to what Carla subjected Heather to in year seven, which takes a flamethrower to the typical “kids being kids” dismissals — with the film’s entire endgame hinging upon half a dozen variables all adhering exactly to a plan. What initially appeared to be a nasty little morality tale about class and exploitation — although interestingly, the respective races of the two women are never explicitly touched upon — reveals itself to be one of those elaborate puzzle boxes with numerous moving pieces that we’re expected to believe took years to build and set in motion. The more the film dwells on specific harms and the contortions required to “make amends,” the more hollow it all feels.
DIRECTOR: Guillem Morales; CAST: Naomie Harris, Natalie Dormer, Dominic Allburn, Jack Morris; DISTRIBUTOR: SHOUT! STUDIOS; IN THEATERS: August 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
