Guillem Morales’s thriller The Wasp is about two women, Heather (Naomie Harris) and Carla (Natalie Dormer), who haven’t spoken since high school. They both still live in the same English town, and their houses are probably only a brief bus ride apart. But they live in different worlds, mostly because only one of them would ever take the bus.
Living a prettified suburban existence, Heather has a posh accent, a beautiful home, and a stylish wardrobe. Her husband, Simon (Dominic Allburn), is successful, though the audience never finds out exactly what he does, just that his is the sort of job that involves hobnobbing with other elegantly dressed people over bottles of presumably expensive wine.
As for Carla, she huddles up with her four kids inside a cramped apartment alongside her husband, Jim (Rupert Holliday-Evans), who seems to divide his time between snoozing in his armchair and gambling away their rent money. We know that he isn’t the father of all of Carla’s kids, but we assume that he’s responsible for the bun in her oven. They’re barely getting by on the money she earns as a cashier at a supermarket—supplemented by the odd bit of sex work—so the prospect of another mouth to feed isn’t one that fills Carla with joy.
After a sluggish opening that tries to draw us into Heather’s headspace while she torments wasps and glares at her husband, The Wasp does a quick and concise job of situating these two women in their very different lives. And, once it brings them together, the film springs into life.
Heather reaches out to Carla to discuss a business proposition with her. The two meet for coffee and then walk through town together, the camera moving quickly to match Carla’s rapid stride and Heather’s rising anxiety as she struggles to keep up. It’s an energetic bit of filmmaking that starkly contrasts with the remainder of the story, which is confined to a single location.
Heather wants Carla to kill her husband. Simon has wronged her and she’s out for revenge. Her memories of Carla’s ruthless behavior during their teenage years convince her that she’s the right woman for the job. On top of that, she knows that Carla can’t afford to turn down the amount of money that she’s offering. From there, the rest of the film is effectively one long conversation between the women as they meet at Heather’s house to discuss the ins and outs of the potential homicide. As they talk, events from their school days come bubbling back to the surface, pushing their conversation and the film’s plot off in a number of unexpected directions.
You can tell that The Wasp was initially written for the stage, with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm adapting her own 2015 play. As more traumatic revelations are made and the tension rises, accusations, and recriminations flying in all directions, Harris and Dormer reel off emotionally charged monologues. And while both performances aren’t without theatrical affectations—exaggerated gestures that probably play well on the stage but look a little odd when the character is treading the boards of a fully realized living room—they’re both generally excellent.
Both Heather and Carla as characters get more nuanced as The Wasp progresses. Heather’s initial fragility gives way to layers of rage that seemed unimaginable just moments earlier. And the dead-eyed bravado that seems to define Carla is revealed to be a defensive pose, something that she struck too early in life and now has calcified into a permanent way of being.
As promised by its title, The Wasp is a film with a stinger in its tail. But some of the revelations that it springs in its third act feel a little heavy-handed, as if it didn’t trust us to fully empathize with its characters unless it subjected their younger selves to the most nightmarish forms of abuse. As the stand-off between Carla and Heather becomes steadily more serious, Morales’s film also writes itself into a bit of corner. And as it struggles to find an elegant way of extracting itself from that corner, we’re led to a finale that’s as unsurprising as it is unsatisfying.
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