Wild Things (1998)

Wild Things arrives from 1998, which is to say from a moment when a director could follow Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer with a swamp-soaked erotic thriller and call it a career move toward the mainstream. John McNaughton assembles Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, and Bill Murray, then sets them loose on a plot involving a false rape accusation, an eight and a half million dollar settlement, and a scheme with more turns than a Florida highway. The Everglades supply atmosphere and humidity. They supply nothing else.

The film's nearest claim to a social program is its class resentment. A poor girl from the trailer park outmaneuvers the wealthy Blue Bay elite, and McNaughton has described the picture as his most political work on exactly those grounds. The observation holds. Suzie Toller ends the film alone on a ninety foot sailboat with a briefcase of cash while nearly everyone with a trust fund is dead or disgraced. That is a real strain of resentment toward money, though it arrives wrapped in nudity, betrayal, and a speargun.

Elsewhere the cultural inventory comes up thin. Daphne Rubin-Vega appears as a detective, a Latina presence in a cast otherwise composed of the pale and the prosperous, and the film treats her as furniture with a badge. A lesbian encounter between Campbell and Richards is staged for the camera's benefit, and a gay subplot involving the two male leads was removed before release, which places the film's queer content in the realm of spectacle. There is no environmental argument, no body-positive message, no neurodivergent representation, and no attempt to rewrite the historical record. The film does not lecture. It seduces, then it removes its own teeth with pliers. As social instruction it is worthless. As a demonstration of how to end a movie, it remains difficult to fault.