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I Care a Lot, review: Rosamund Pike brings back that icy Gone Girl thrill

Rosamund Pike is chilling as a manipulative carer for the elderly  - Seacia Pavao
Rosamund Pike is chilling as a manipulative carer for the elderly - Seacia Pavao
  • Dir: J Blakeson. Cast: Rosamund Pike, Eiza González, Peter Dinklage, Dianne Wiest, Chris Messina, Alicia Witt. 15 cert, 120 mins

Rosamund Pike plays wicked scheming with brio – you could say she puts a shine on it. In the icy comic thriller I Care A Lot, her character Marla Grayson is purely out for profit, and looks like she takes no prisoners – except that’s precisely what she’s doing. Her grift is to exploit the elderly by getting them committed to retirement homes against their will, while she seizes their assets and funnels them into needlessly expensive custodial care.

This barracuda has the whole operation honed to a tee. She gets tipped off by an unscrupulous doctor (Alicia Witt) when someone’s ripe for the plucking, and uses every trick in court to make her “legal guardianship” sound like the right and honourable thing. Any lawyers or family members stepping in are the ones framed as grasping predators, not she.

Meanwhile, her stakes in the care-home business nicely feather the nest. Her office displays floor-to-ceiling mugshots of the OAPs she’s feeding off, with a system of stickers to denote which accounts are still a healthy goldmine, or which have bled dry.

You’ll hate Marla, and – as with her obvious Pike predecessor, the deviously vengeful Amy Dunne in Gone Girl – she simply won’t care. She vapes. Writer-director J Blakeson’s film plays a risky game in making almost everyone else on screen despicable: where’s the rooting interest to come from? It arrives, for a little while, with Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a baffled pensioner who’s Marla’s latest victim, self-sufficient up to now in her stately suburban pile. But this time, as we’re about to find out, she scammed the wrong old lady.

That’s about 20 minutes of plot, and ghoulishly clever as it is, I’m saying no more – the film’s certainly a dish best served cold. The con game Marla’s playing might have a noirish flavour – she wears femme-fatale shades indoors, has a hair cut that could slice your fingers off, and patrols her patch in zesty power suits – but the twists are too outlandish for it to stay strictly in that zone. The combination of guile and misanthropy might remind you of a dark caper like Jim Thompson’s The Grifters cross-bred with the Coen Brothers at their most heartless (The Ladykillers or Burn After Reading, say).

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection. There’s a great skirmish between Pike and Chris Messina, plushly insinuating as a shady attorney who’s rumbled Marla’s racket but has a vested interest in simply paying her off.

While Wiest has fewer scenes to chew on in the second half, her white-hot fury gains a glinting malevolence – she juts out her chin like a bulldog that’s just been deprived of its bone, and fairly snarls when anyone lays a hand on her. Marla’s main antagonist, though, is shaping up to be a Russian underworld boss, played with sorrowful verve by Peter Dinklage. The film has carefully selected him as her immoral equal – a ruthless gangster who exploits mules for drug-running and at one point dispassionately punches her in the face.

If the film has anything so touchy-feely as a subject, it might be rapacious capitalism gorging on these juicy pension pots, and the pure sangfroid of a Marla, who refuses to lose no matter how many vicious male threats get shoved (or spat) in her face. It’s not that she has nothing to lose – we soon realise her business partner Fran (sultry Eiza González) is also her girlfriend of some years. But they’re one of those naughty noir couples where you feel the money, and occasional victory sex, affords the thrill that keeps them together.

The game might start with our slavering anticipation of Marla’s downfall, but it mutates. You even start wondering if Pike, enjoying herself to the hilt in this mode, might do the impossible and turn our sympathies around. While her glacial assurance fits the character like a glove, it’s the flickers of hesitancy that start to fascinate.

Available on Amazon Prime Video now