Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: BECKY [Denver Film Festival 2020 - Virtual]

The aspect of female vigilante thrillers is based on stakes but also a texture of where the line of morality lies. As a perspective of that exercise, "Becky" is an interesting texture since it takes that away. It is not about gender. Becky just happens to be a girl...a teenage one at that...and despite the fact that the weekend is not going the way she planned, she is pissed. But she would have been angry even if invaders had not come to her father's family weekend. Lulu Wilson embodies Becky with abandon, tenderness and nihilism but also a sardonic streak. The headgear can't help but bring out a hark to the middle sister in "Bob's Burgers". In this way, it is almost like, despite the circumstances, he is also having hher own private adventure going on inside her head. Where the style at about a third through the film harkens to "Evil Dead" for a brief moment, it tends to pull back though the gore per se never does let up. It is over-the-top on purpose to offset almost the character drama that happens at other points. Where that oddly enough happens beyond the obviously harrowing aspect of Becky's trauma is between the two lead criminals that intercede. The lead baddie is played by Kevin James, initially almost unrecognizable, and intentionally so. This role takes him to a whole new level, and a subversive one at that. The character is not likeable but James gives him a little bit of heart in an odd way, a logic that doesn't make sense (but to his character it does). Granted the set-up into which this idea plays is more of a MacGuffin which doesn't truly come to bear, the eventual texture that grounds the idea is trying to remind audience that Becky does exist in the real world. There are consequences to her actions and others, both to the outside but also to her own psyche. B

By Tim Wassberg