Thoroughbreds (2018)

There is something almost restful about a film that declines to tell us how to feel. Cory Finley's debut follows Lily and Amanda, two affluent Connecticut teenagers who reunite after years apart and drift toward the murder of Lily's stepfather. The milieu is entirely white and entirely comfortable, a world of mansions and tutoring sessions where the only genuine deprivation is moral. Amanda announces early that she does not experience emotions, a clinical blankness the film treats as a premise to be explored, not a condition to be championed. No cause is pleaded on her behalf. She is a sociopath with good posture, and the screenplay lets her remain one.

The two young women at the center are cold, calculating, and largely unsympathetic, which is its own quiet subversion of the nurturing roles such characters are usually handed. That is as far as the film's social program extends. It offers no thesis, no sermon, no moment where a character turns to the camera and explains what we should have learned. The wealth on display is hollow and the rich kids are monstrous, but the camera observes this with a shrug instead of a raised fist. Race never enters the frame. Neither does the climate, the body, nor any historical grievance. Amanda's closing dream of a world surrendered to vanity and overrun by horses is a surreal flourish, not a parable about the environment.

What remains is a taut, amoral chamber piece that trusts its audience to draw their own conclusions, or none at all. Anton Yelchin, in his final American role, brings a jolt of anxious energy to a film otherwise composed of long, still stares. The result is chilly, precise, and admirably indifferent to being liked. We are left to sit with two killers and a dead stepfather, and nobody tells us what it meant.