An immersive first-person dive into the mind of a sociopath, Beautiful Friend is a quietly powerful first feature from US indie writer-director Truman Kewley. Shot with crisp formal precision and leavened by hints of darkly ironic humour, this lean two-hander involves a mentally fragile young man abducting a woman and holding her captive, hoping she will fall in love with him. There are distant echoes here of William Wyler’s classic psychological thriller The Collector (1965), but also more recent domestic-prison dramas like Room (2015) and Girl in the Basement (2021). Following its world premiere this week in Oldenburg, Kewley’s disquieting debut should generate further festival buzz, particularity for its timely depiction of toxic masculinity and beta-male misogyny.
Daniel (Adam Jones) is an “incel”, an involuntary celibate whose loneliness and sexual frustration has curdled into a festering, self-pitying, all-consuming obsession. He has come to bitterly resent women for not giving him the attention he craves. “I am a good man, I am a strong man,” he assures himself in the hypnotic, chillingly calm voice-over that runs through Beautiful Friend like music. “All I want is what everybody else has.” No screen narration has sounded this soothingly sinister since HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
With a triumphant tone, Daniel announces he has finally come up with a world-shaking master plan to fix his problems with the opposite sex. Alarmingly, it involves stalking women on the street with the aim of kidnap, imprisonment and worse. After a series of failed approaches, which look like discreetly filmed documentary-style encounters with real women, he forcefully abducts Madison (Alexandrea Meyer), locking her into his specially adapted van and driving her out to a remote desert location. The self-deluding Daniel talks about his captive in terms of blossoming romance, but coercive sex is his real goal, at least initially. A jarringly bleak rape scene, shot with Meyer staring blankly out at the viewer, invites uncomfortable questions about audience complicity.
It soon transpires that Daniel once attended film school and has worked on movie sets, which has given him a kind of directorial detachment towards his crimes. Like the voyeuristic serial killer in Peeping Tom (1960), he distances himself from his abusive actions though a camera lens. He films Madison constantly, even adding her name to the screen as an acting credit. The POV pulls back to become a film within a film in places, as if Daniel is editing and shaping this entire narrative in post-production. Quick-fire single-word captions also appear on screen fleetingly, deepening the sense that we are watching one man’s fragile psyche filtered through the visual grammar of experimental art-house movies.
Besides working as a straight abduction thriller, Beautiful Friend could be read as grimly funny satire on power relations in cinema, which has been dominated by the leering, controlling male gaze for most of the last century. Director Daniel certainly needs leading lady Madison to play her pre-ordained role, not as his terrified kidnap victim but as his fantasy screen sweetheart. “She’s starting to understand,” he tells himself approvingly. “She’s going to love me.” As soon as she veers off script, he becomes an enraged, whining, narcissistic man-baby again. There are a millions of real Daniels out there, and not just in the film industry.
After leaving the desert and returning to Los Angeles, Daniel moves Madison into his house, chaining her up in the bedroom. Their relationship slowly settles into a grotesque parody of conventional suburban couples, with her dutifully perforrming her assigned girlfriend role on the surface while quietly making escape plans. The film’s weak point is its fuzzy ending, which feels like an indecisive cop-out, though it still leaves a tangibly creepy aftertaste. Impressively, Kewley also wears multiple hats as his own editor and cinematographer here, framing Beautiful Friend with a starkly geometric eye, like some kind of evil low-budget Wes Anderson.
Full disclosure here: the writer-director of Beautiful Friend is the son of a senior staff member at The Film Verdict, a connection that this reviewer only discovered after watching the film. This has not coloured the review at all, which was already short-listed for our Oldenburg festival coverage based on its stand-alone merits.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing: Truman Kewley
Cast: Adam Jones, Alexandrea Meyer
Producer: Ron Huang
Production company: Fiction Park (Germany)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Independent)
In English
80 minutes
