“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you sicken and die of them? Still in silence.” For the political activists in Jessica Barr’s debut feature, The Plan, this passage is a kind of prayer. What, indeed, does this dysfunctional group of young adults need to say? Why are they going to do what they’ve so carefully planned to do? Barr’s film is not actually about concrete ideology, nor is it about the execution of carefully laid plans. Set on the eve of a radical act, Barr’s audacious one-take, real-time chamber drama favors the strained relationships and frayed psychologies of its central characters over the intricacies of political action.
The leader of the group is Mads, cold and uncompromising, a totalitarian. “It’s her fucking universe and we’re all just living in it,” she exclaims about her estranged mother late in the film, without a glimmer of self-awareness. Her girlfriend, Emily, is her right hand. Part comforter, part enforcer, one moment she collects everyone’s cell phones and drowns them in a bath of water and mouthwash, then consoles a nervous member of the collective the next. Evan is paranoid about the plan, but even more so about how it’s separated her from her boyfriend, Liam, who has cozied up to Sasha over the last few months.
Mads’ roommate, Toby, is an alcoholic gay guy with misogynistic tendencies. His boyfriend just, understandably, broke up with him, so he’s not worried about, and perhaps looks forward to, the chance for an easy out. Taylor is bankrolling the plan. She’s idealistic and perhaps susceptible to the collective vigor of the group. As a queer, Black woman, and the token liberal, however, she’s an outsider on multiple fronts. When she’s questioned about having been to the movies with an unknown date over the weekend, she’s restrained by her fellow activists and verbally berated to the point of tears. “Why would you go on a date so soon to today,” Sasha asks, incredulously, almost fearfully. “Know your place,” threatens Mads.
Barr searches for the answers to this and other existential questions. What, indeed, is there to live for when you’ve already planned your death in a fiery act of political activism? What is actually going to happen to everyone else the moment after they set off “the goods?” To any viewer with an active pulse, the answer is obvious; life is just as important, if not more so, as you approach its end; and they’ll leave a lot of innocent bloodshed in their wake. Barr knows this, and her film reaches this conclusion early on without anywhere else to go.
And this is because Barr has a pointedly ungenerous view of radical political activists, taking their extremist views to task through basic pleas for humanity that they cannot answer. Emily calls the innocent victim of their planned attack “sheep”, her contempt for those who stay on the sidelines shoots like venom; they will either kill or be killed, “we’re just giving them a head start,” she hisses to a despairing Evan. Similar to the film’s one-take gimmick, which prizes a sense of immediacy while getting simultaneously bogged down in every character’s storyline, Barr’s perspective is complex but largely unambiguous. Save for the film’s final moments — when the group drives to the airport and an inconsolable, impassioned Taylor pleads, if unconvincingly, to a now-resigned Evan that community, rather than violence, might be the answer — Barr doesn’t offer the viewer much of a challenge, and certainly no real call to empathize with the likes of Mads, Emily, or the complexity of their convictions. By refusing to engage with the group’s concrete political aims — even suggesting that they don’t have any to begin with — The Plan’s perspective is deprived of a more rounded humanity.
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