Emily the Criminal Review: A Volcanic Aubrey Plaza Anchors a Routine Crime Drama

John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal reflects the influence of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. A realist drama about a downtrodden woman, Emily (Aubrey Plaza), trying to make ends meet in L.A., the film apes the vérité visual style for which the Dardennes are famous, complete with a handheld camera that routinely floats behind Emily as she traipses through unglamorous locales. But such resemblances are ultimately superficial, as Ford’s film never approaches the same level of social incisiveness as Rosetta and L’Enfant, among other towering works of so-called “responsible” realism by the Dardenne brothers.

The issue confronting Emily is her struggle to pay off the suffocating student debt that she accumulated during her time in art school. This eventually forces the young woman, who had a past run-in with the law when she was charged with assaulting a former boyfriend, to become part of various credit card fraud schemes under the direction of a charismatic scammer named Youcef (Theo Rossi). While these schemes prove increasingly lucrative, the film intriguingly suggests that Emily pursues her life of crime less out of greedy monetary self-interest than a sense that she’s finally found her calling in life after spending years as a menial laborer.

The audience certainly senses this in the way that Emily exhibits greater initiative throughout the film, becoming more integral to the plotting of Youcef’s schemes and less afraid about resorting to force when necessary. In a kinetically shot and startling sequence, two low-level hoodlums follow her into her apartment, hold her at knifepoint, and steal her savings, after which a tearful Emily quickly collects herself and turns the tables on the crooks by tracking them down and, armed with a taser, violently takes back what they stole from her.

Thanks to Plaza’s performance, Emily the Criminal ably demonstrates the chilling plausibility of Emily’s descent into crime. Plaza is coolly detached and resistant whenever Emily is in social settings, while, conversely, appearing loose and uninhibited whenever the character is on the clock for Youcef. This gives the impression, at once compelling and disturbing, that Emily is subconsciously uninterested in settling into a conventional lifestyle.

But beyond establishing that Emily’s problems stem from crushing student loans and the inability to find a job that offers livable wages, Ford’s script is largely uninterested in contextualizing Emily as a casualty of a distinctly 21st-century reality. This is only effectively articulated in one scene where Emily is at a job interview and learns from the prospective employer, Alice (Gina Gershon), that the job is an unpaid internship, at which point the meeting turns into a blistering verbal sparring match. While Emily rails against the notion of not being paid for working, Alice, who mentions that she had to work from the bottom to get to her rather cushy current position, lambasts Emily over her ostensible sense of entitlement. But, as Emily points out, Alice still had the benefit of being paid when she started out.

This scene is striking for Plaza and Gershon’s vigorous interplay, and for the way it views Emily’s problems through a generational lens: Emily doesn’t enjoy Alice’s lifelong financial security simply because the latter was born in a different era. But as this is the lone time that Ford details the specific context of Emily’s money problems, the character’s crippling student debt ultimately comes off merely as the narrative’s obligatory motivating factor for her to enter a life of crime. Emily the Criminal may not suffer from didacticism, but it’s almost perversely at its most volcanic when it promises to blossom into a study of a generation’s financial difficulties than when it’s capturing a descent into crime in Dardennian fashion.