The central irony undergirding director Mary Nighy’s Alice, Darling is that while the victim in an abusive relationship might not recognize her psychological injuries as such, they can be anything but invisible to the people around her. The opening imagery, the most patent metaphor in a film that hardly shies away from being direct, suggests that self-assured yuppie Alice (Anna Kendrick) is submerged within the murky depths of her situation—like the proverbial fish, perhaps, unable to perceive the water. It’s a bit pat, but it works.
Alice is prone to humblebragging about a relationship that’s anything but stable, as she’s suffering abuse at the hands of her live-in boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick). By contrast, Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn) and Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) barely hide their discomfort with their friend’s relationship, even encouraging her to respond to a waiter’s (Ethan Mitchell) obvious crush in Alice, Darling’s opening scene. And after inviting her on a trip to Sophie’s parents’ lake house for Tess’s birthday, they give her a collective eyebrow raise when she tries to demur because, implicitly, any time spent away from Simon leads to trouble at home.
From the outset, Alanna Francis and Mark Van de Ven’s script offers acutely observed details of the anxiety that dominates Alice’s life whenever she’s not in social-presentation mode. In the cab on the way home from drinks with the girls, she chews on her lower lip and wraps a strand of hair around her fingertip. At home, she frantically washes off the phone number that the waiter wrote on her receipt before then throwing it away. And walking to work with Simon the next day, she practices the lie that will allow her to go on the girls weekend.
The nature of the insecure and controlling Simon’s abuse, which we learn about as Alice begins to reflect on her relationship while on the trip with Tess and Sophie, consists of abusive language and emotional blackmail. He accuses her of betrayal any time that she exercises any independence; demands her attention via text (and sext), even when she’s out with friends; and occasionally excoriates her for alleged personal faults. This behavior serves to isolate her from her friends, and during the trip to the lake house, the filmmakers emphasize Alice’s withdrawal from her friends, sticking us in her head via impressionistic montage. False match cuts to Simon giving her needy looks or reacting with forced, intimidating outrage at invented faults underline the way that the pressure he exerts on Alice sticks with her even when they’re apart.
Kendrick’s star persona plays well into the role of a woman whose inner solitude and discomfort hides behind a mask of composure and defensive sardonicism. Alice, Darling seemingly nods to that persona in a scene in which Alice refuses to sing along to Lisa Loeb’s “Stay,” turning down a potentially meme-able moment. But there’s more to the performance than clever play with Kendrick’s celebrity, as the actress, often framed in pensive close-ups, makes the process of Alice’s realization that she’s an abuse victim dynamic without overplaying it.
If the film’s attention to Alice’s psyche, rooted in Kendrick’s often captivating performance, provides the kind of concrete detail that makes her character more than a case study, it’s difficult to say the same for Tess and Sophie. The friendships that provide the story’s essential pivot points feel significantly less lived-in than Alice’s inner conflict over her relationship, more naked in their structural function. As conflict between the women over Alice’s inability to enjoy her time on vacation emerge, the opposing roles that the women play in the eventual intervention (Sophie empathetic and cautious, Tess direct and severe) feel schematic, their history as friends less apparent than their function as supporting characters.
The solidarity among the women is crucial as the plot comes to its cathartic confrontation with Simon. But the emotional crux of Alice Darling is less the manner in which it lays out a roadmap for an exit from an abusive relationship and more its attentiveness to the profound ramifications of such relationships for the women in them. This is a statement film inextricably tied to discourse in and around fourth-wave feminism, but it’s also a reminder that stories serve to expand this discourse by providing opportunities for deeper understanding and empathy.
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