VILLAINS (2019)

Your New Favorite Screwball Horror Comedy

2019’s VILLAINS, from directors Dan Berk and Rob Olson, stars a cucumber-cool Bill Skarsgård, Maika Monroe devouring a role that calls for sharp-edged sweetness, a delightfully demented Kyra Sedgwick, and a pragmatically deranged Jeffrey Donovan. It’s a change up pitch of a film, both screwball horror comedy centred by a sincere romantic angle, keeping the viewer a little off balance. It’s a delicate balance to strike but Olson and Berk pull it off with aplomb. VILLAINS feels like a small miracle of a film, because it doesn’t have its sharp edges filed down, like a lot of modern films watered down, by other interests, until it’s free of anything that might be unpleasant for a viewer to experience.

The film’s leads, Jules and Mickey, are definitely lovers on the lamb, they aren’t cut from the same cloth as Mickey and Mallory from Oliver Stone’s hyperviolent 1994 film NATURAL BORN KILLERS.  They also bare little resemblance to the Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, of Arthur Penn’s blood soaked classic, except perhaps in the pair’s desire for a better life. Jules and Mickey are played mostly as a pair of wayward young adults just trying their best to eek out an existence, with low rent stick ups until they can quit the lawless life for the sunny Florida climes.  In fact, the couple’s daydreams of an imagined Florida filling the screen after the title cards illustrate beautifully how it’s the duo’s biggest six pack wish and hotdog dream they can fathom. A place where all their troubles will be washed away. They do not long for notoriety, in the way both the fictionalized and real-life versions of Bonnie and Clyde (or Mickey and Mallory, for that matter), as evidenced by their disguises when they hold up the gas station at the beginning. A white rubber unicorn mask for Jules, and a pigeon mask for Mickey. They commit to their life of crime as a way to get them to what perhaps only they see as a better life. But it’s through the performances of Monroe and Skarsgård that this truly feels like that is all they need or want from the world—and through their on-screen sincerity, we as an audience want that for them.

While they are different from their lovers-on-the-lam predecessors, VILLAINS’ lead couple also share some similarities. But even in doing so Berk and Olson try to put their own spin on it. For example, the car wash scene which may be my favourite scene in the entire film. It’s a moment of intimacy which is commonplace in films like the two films previously mentioned, as well as David Lowery’s AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS. As their getaway car runs out of gas in the middle of Jules giving Mickey head, a compromise after its mutually decided perhaps pulling over for a little afternoon delight as they make their escape isn’t the wisest play, things start to go wrong. The irony of the fact the couple just robbed a gas station, a droll aside, driven home by Jules proclaiming, “wha,wha, we just robbed…” Mickey cutting her off before she can fully spit out that they just robbed a gas station.  Mickey soon begins to have a panic attack on the side of the road, brought on by predicament. Knowing him as well as she does, Jules takes a seat on the empty road and commands her beloved to do the same, seemingly knowing the secret to unlock his anxiety. In a moment of naked intimacy, the type of which can only be experienced between two long term partners deeply in love, Jules performs what she calls a car wash. Straddling Mickey she leans her head down so that his face is cocooned in the safety of her mane of white golden hair, and she recedes to wipe her hair across his face, simulating the motions of an industrial sized car wash brush.  It’s a beautiful scene that speaks to the love the couple have for one another and makes the pair instantly sympathetic to the viewer. It’s so effective in garnering the audience’s goodwill that Berk and Olson wisely use variations of the scene throughout the film to signal different story shifts.

Another wise and subtly different approach the film makes is in its decision to go from a film like NATURAL BORN KILLERS, Terence Malick’s BADLANDS, or even the most recent entry in the genre, the Bella Thorne starring INFAMOUS, where the action moves from place to place, into something of a single setting picture. Much more akin to a film like FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. It lends VILLAINS a feeling like when we first meet George and Gloria that we the audience are watching the film’s true beginning.

Jules and Mickey spot the house in the immediate aftermath of their beautifully shared moment of intimacy, and it’s soon after that we meet the titular characters. The pair own the home that Mickey and Jules have broken into, in search of anything to side in their flight from the laws long arm. In their search of the house, they make their way down into the basement, after taking a couple bumps of cocaine from a small stash of drugs that appear to be one of the few belongings the couple had thought to pack before the gas station robbery. Their drug addled minds deciding they could use a hose to siphon gas from the vehicle in the garage and use to fill their own broken-down vehicle.  In searching the basement Jules and Mickey stumble upon a young girl, played with an effective emotionlessness by Blake Baumgartner. A few minutes later, after it’s decided they are not leaving the girl behind, the pair can be scene rifling through the kitchen cupboards the camera panning back so the audience sees George and Gloria before Jules and Mickey.

After a brief standoff, George manages to diffuse the tension of the moment, and get the clearly agitated younger couple to agree to sit down with them to see if perhaps something can not be worked out. The couples seated across from one another, it instantly becomes noticeable to the audience that Jules and Mickey could be a younger version of George and Gloria. The viewer can definitely see Gloria imagining herself in Jules, albeit thirty years younger. The audience sees George feeling the same way about Mickey. It is a wonderful moment and the film’s true beginning. A test of wills between the two couples, a back and forth, each couple trying to outwit the other, the younger couple feeling they have got the better of the situation.

Through this scene, and many others, VILLAINS won me over. While not a typical take on the material, I feel like its approach genuinely helps to differentiate from similar movies. It’s a film that perfectly straddles the line between comedy and horror, without ever sacrificing one for the other. And while it may never become a cult classic, I feel it more than earns its place in the horror comedy canon.