Role Play (2023)

Thomas Vincent's Role Play arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly how little it intends to say. Kaley Cuoco plays Emma, a New Jersey mother of two who also kills people for money, a premise the screenplay treats as a mild scheduling inconvenience. The picture is produced by Cuoco herself, and it grants her character the competence of a woman who can dismantle two Sovereign operatives on foot and still make it home for the school run. That is a modest species of empowerment, the kind that asks for no speeches and receives none. The casting of David Oyelowo as her devoted husband, and Rudi Dharmalingam as her handler Raj, gives the ensemble a visible diversity that the film never once comments upon. Nobody remarks on the marriage. Nobody explains Raj. The movie simply proceeds, and in its incurious way, that restraint is nearly admirable.

The villainous outfit is called Sovereign, which sounds like a critique of something and turns out to be a critique of nothing. There is no indictment of wealth here, no environmental sermon, no revisionist reading of history, no advocacy of any kind. The film has no interest in bodies, in neurodivergence, or in the inner lives of anyone who is not currently being shot at. What it offers instead is a light, unserious romp through Berlin and a compound in the woods, content to let its heroine strangle a blackmailer in a hotel corridor and then apologize for a missed anniversary. Reviewers noted that the whole affair refuses to take itself seriously, and they were right to notice. It is a movie that has decided moral weight is somebody else's department.

We are left, then, with a competent, harmless, thoroughly unexamined piece of streaming entertainment. It does not lecture. It does not enlighten. It does not even particularly try. There is a strange integrity in that, though I would not call it ambition. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds it drinkable, and sets it down without further remark.