Emily the Criminal film review — Aubrey Plaza turns to a life of lawbreaking

The glower of actor Aubrey Plaza is a thing of great beauty and precision, as subtle as a stiletto secretly sheathed in a kicky pair of boots. She can use it for comic effect, as with her eye-rolling millennial intern April in Parks and Recreation. Or she can deploy it to suggest vampy erotic power (sublime indie film Black Bear) or even demonic malevolence (TV series Legion). Cast in the title role and getting a chance to show off her terrific range in drama Emily the Criminal, this time Plaza expresses indignation, the anger of a young woman who’s been screwed around by luck, circumstance and poor life choices for too long and is getting her own back now, big time.

Working long hours for a catering company to make ends meet in Los Angeles, New Jersey-reared art school-graduate Emily has a massive student loan she’s struggling to pay off. A criminal record for assaulting an ex-lover (we never quite get the full story) and driving under the influence is keeping her from getting better-paying jobs. But a colleague tips her off about a potential side hustle. It’s a scam run by a handsome Lebanese immigrant Youcef (Theo Rossi) and his brother Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori). They need “dummy” buyers for expensive stuff (such as massive TVs) paid for with stolen credit card information, who will then hand over the goods to be fenced to customers looking for a bargain.

Emily turns out to be surprisingly good at this line of work, thanks to guts of steel, a sharp, quick mind and that killer glower. She starts taking riskier but more lucrative jobs from Youcef, with whom an inevitable relationship blossoms, but how far will she go? Writer-director John Patton Ford unfolds a smart parable about the economic pressures on this generation, superbly illustrated by a brace of scenes at the beginning and end where Emily goes for job interviews.

In the first, her criminal record is the problem — arguably fair enough, although Emily rightly takes exception to the slimy, gotcha way the HR executive brings it up; in the second, she rejects the expectation that she should work for free as an intern in order to get a foot in the door at an advertising agency. Viewers will have to find out how much of a criminal Emily is willing to become, but in those two scenes she could kill with a look alone.

★★★★☆

In cinemas in the UK from October 28; it is available online in the US