THE WASP – Review by Leslie Combemale
I love how the press notes for The Wasp call it “a story with a sting in its tail”, because it’s the perfect description of this taut thriller. It offers a wonderful platform for two spectacularly talented actors to perform together, and Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer have more than enough skill and talent to navigate the sharp shifts required in The Wasp, moment by moment, in the name of storytelling and character development.
Heather (Harris) and Carla (Dormer) haven’t spoken for years, after being in school as children together. Heather has gone on to live an upper-middle class life, but desperately wants to be a mother. Carla, who works as a check out girl, has a brood of kids and a husband losing her wages gambling. When Heather makes Carla a proposition to (no spoiler, since it’s in the trailer) kill her husband, the two go down memory lane, and it’s a messy, bloody, trauma-filled road that may lead to disaster.
The murder for hire plot of The Wasp is the framework through which to examine the long buried complicated and increasingly rotten history between two very different women…and OH the twists and turns! More than once, I said out loud, “what’s happening?!?”, but not in a “what happened to this movie, and why do I care?” kind of way, but rather with “Oh boy! Here we go!” excitement.
Explanations for the machinations and twists slowly unfurl as the film’s plot unfolds, and we, as audience members, are kept in thrall, like the tarantula hawk wasp that paralyzes its prey. Also, our allegiances to the characters are constantly shifting. Who, of either of them, is a “good girl”?
The film is based on a play by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, who also penned the screenplay. She was inspired to write it having noticed a dearth of meaty, complicated two-hander play with two powerful women. Well, she wrote the hell out of this one, and her screenplay is only further elevated by the casting of Harris and Dormer as characters about whom viewers will feel a whole lot of complicated feelings for…neither role is easy to pull off, but they do an amazing job. This film represents another career defining challenge for each of them.
Women are often, in reality, very different from how we express ourselves in the world and how the world sees us, a fact very well captured within The Wasp‘s 1 1/2 running time. At the core of it, though, the movie is just a fun, twisty, turn-y psycho-thriller. Really, The Wasp had me stunned and stung by the performances of Naomi Harris and Natalie Dormer. As acting partners, the two together are *chef’s kiss*. They really should be the next two leads in True Detective, but in the meantime, fly to see The Wasp at your local theater so you can support their badassery on the big screen.
4 1/2 out of 5 stars.
