I Care a Lot (2021)

I Care a Lot opens on a monologue about the two kinds of people in this world, predators and prey, then spends two hours proving the point with a grim efficiency that is difficult to fault. Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a court-appointed guardian who farms the elderly for their assets with the help of a compliant doctor and a judge who signs whatever is placed in front of him. The target is the for-profit guardianship industry, and the film goes after it with real teeth. It is a black comedy about commodified old age, and it earns its nastiness.

Where the film gets interesting, from a classification standpoint, is in its domestic arrangement. Marla and her partner Fran run the scam together, share a bed, and marry before the credits, and the film treats this as unremarkable. No coming-out scene, no raised eyebrow. The couple simply exists, and the story proceeds. Against that, the film toys with reading Marla as a feminist icon, a woman beating men at their own ruthless game, then quietly pulls the rug. She is not a heroine. She is a predator who happens to wear heels. The cast is diverse in a way crime thrillers rarely manage, with Peter Dinklage as the mafia son and Eiza Gonzalez as the co-lead, though the film never pauses to mention any of it.

Everything else is missing. No racial consciousness, no engagement with climate, no body politics, no neurodivergence, no reworking of history. Marla's sociopathy is villainy, not a diagnosis. The social critique lands through plot and pitch-black comedy instead of a sermon, which keeps the lecturing to a minimum and the entertainment intact. The result is a film that skewers late-stage capitalism without ever climbing onto a soapbox, and then kills its protagonist in the street. We have seen worse.