The horse is powerful. In ancient mythology, it is often present, serving as a symbol of tranquility, balance, or war, depending on whatever story you find yourself submersed in. In Thoroughbreds, the horse is a blank slate, introduced at the beginning with no story preceding it. It could be a re-telling of Celtic mythology, where horses bring good luck and good fortune. It could be linked to the Romans, who associated horses with Mars, the God of fury. It could be all of these, a moment left we’re left to wonder as Olivia Cooke runs her hand down the face of a beautiful, brown show horse, brandishing a knife from within her backpack. Before the audience is allowed the opportunity to decide what this moment may mean, the scene rapidly shifts. We’re now following a car pulling up to a mansion.
The horse serves man, yet, the horse is also free.
Thoroughbreds, Cory Finley’s directorial debut, is a satirical thriller that finds its strength in self-reflection. Adapted from stage to film, the movie was released worldwide on March 9th of this year. Set around two, broody, high school students, the film consistently bounces between female leads Lily (Anya Taylor Joy) and Amanda (Olivia Cooke). Chaos is integral to the plot. The central focus is whether Lily will follow through with killing her stepfather and the anxiety leading up to it is heightened through ominous violin chords and rhythmic drumbeats, the kind that may accompany a sacrifice. For Amanda, life altering decisions are simple. Driven by her lack of emotions, she is deft at cutting the problem off from the root. If a plant is dying, you get rid of the flowers that don’t allow it to bloom. In a way, this is exactly what Amanda is trying to do for Lily, allowing her to bloom.
Amanda is uninhibited. Comfortable with her often-intense persona, she stumbles in to Lily’s house on a self-guided tour, where she happens upon photos of Lily’s step father Mark (Paul Sparks) proudly posed next to a lion he has killed. When Lily shows up, Amanda is standing on a chair unsheathing a sword, an act which Lily ends up apologizing for despite Amanda’s intrusion. Although this is Lily’s house, and Lily’s story to tell, it’s up to Amanda on how it will be told.
She is the driving force in planting the seeds.
The air is thick upon meeting one another. The tension tells that their friendship isn’t new. The two have history that stems from their childhood horseback riding, history that becomes rekindled when Amanda seeks Lily out for tutoring help on behalf of her mother. Like dipping your toes in a cold pool, they test the waters of what’s on and off boundaries going forward. Lily pauses at an SAT prep question regarding a horse, unsure how to approach it knowing Amanda’s pending conviction murdering her show horse, Honeymooner. “It’s only weird if you make it weird,” an emotionless Amanda tells Lily, bookmarking their beginning.
Though the relationship is familiar, it is stiff, coming to light fourteen minutes in the film when the two hug. Just like re-learning to ride a bike, the practice is awkward at first, a skill mastered through practice. They embrace after Lily speaks about how uncomfortable and scary Amanda is, saying she reminds her of a YouTube video where a zit is popped or a baby is born without a face. The hug is weird at first but grows more relaxed the longer they hold each other. Their walls melt.
Amanda’s abrasiveness perfectly foils Lily’s relatively composed demeanor. Where one lacks, the other picks up, at times switching dynamic of who leads and who follows. It’s apparent that these jaded rich girls have common ground in being never satisfied. Everything they ever need is at their fingertips and yet, it still isn’t enough. While Amanda’s manifests in ambivalence, Lily’s is persistence. Her never ending struggle for greatness is what fuels her throughout the movie. She is not as perfect as she appears on paper and it drives her crazy. Presented with the truth she never had an internship and was kicked out of school for plagiarism, her true essence begins to shine through. Her grasp is slipping on her flawlessly conceived reality and the only way she knows how to combat this is by confronting the one obstacle that stands in her way: her step father.
Their relationship is the purest form of friendship. In a messed up, extremely dark way, they are completely themselves with one another, at ease with calling out their bullshit. Unlike the teen drama Heathers, which also centers around the relationship of female friendship and destruction, they’re constantly on the same team. The flow of id and ego is constantly balanced, the battle of light and dark communal. The bookmark of a great friendship isn’t the triumphs, it’s the failures, sharing harrowing experiences and thriving throughout. To show your worst face to the ones you trust is a leap of faith. To say “I’m fucked up and I want you to know, you can’t fix it or change it,” a badge of honor.
Despite sharing emotional proximity, the best of friendships flourish when left to their own devices. The two live completely different lifestyles and not all of it can be shared with the other. Their distance is framed seamlessly by cinematographer Lyle Vincent, who opts for off-putting wide angles to establish an eerie, off-kilter feel. Even when they’re seen sitting on the couch enjoying one another’s company, the two are spaced unreasonably far from each other, positioned on Lily’s pristine white couch near separate armrests. When turf is switched, the wall is broken down. The two sink in to Amanda’s couch the only time they are seen hanging out at her house. Away from her perfect life, Lily is finally at ease asking Amanda how exactly she could get away with killing her stepfather, the hypotheticals she has been pondering for quite some time. The discomfort is broken for both characters when they are unearthed from their typical whereabouts. Lily’s world is control, Amanda’s is leisure. Though both are uneasy in these established environments, they create a symbiosis with each other. They make the world their own to conquer, an example that comes to fruition with the introduction of Anton Yelchin’s character, Tim.
In his last film experience, Yelchin brings to life his character Tim, the 25-year-old ex-convict who makes his living off selling drugs to minors. Arguably the only good character in the movie, Tim represents a cornerstone to the girls relationship. The super-ego operating as a moral conscience to their id and ego. Running in to Lily at a party, he presents an alternative to the wealthy life she’s accustomed to, claiming “the thing about this town is, the sawdust smells fantastic, but you are still in a hamster cage.” Clearly out of her element, Tim is the only person Lily is comfortable enough to talk to at the party. In a way, he’s the type of person Amanda dreams of becoming. Someone who dropped out of school to pursue being a “Steve Jobs” level entrepreneur. Floating through life with out of grasp ideas, Tim claims he’ll be “running this town in five to ten years,” though he has no idea how he’ll do it. He’s intoxicated by the idea of escape despite being from Westchester. Extracting himself from the only known way of life in Thoroughbreds, he’s viewed as someone who escaped. Devoid of the consumption and consumerism that has made Lily and Amanda tone deaf to emotional depth, Tim is living free. He swears off being slave to the materialistic world yet runs his tattooed hands over the expensive red car in Lily’s garage, all the while Ave Maria plays softly in the background.
The ideal scapegoat to their female friendship, Tim finds himself prey to powerful women. He refuses to kill Mark despite the girls blackmailing him and for it, receives a wound on his head courtesy of Amanda knocking him out with a lamp. As Tim lays limp in the foyer, Amanda looks directly at Lily and says “what’s worse than being unkind, being evil, being nice, is being indecisive,” forcing her to seriously consider the finality of what murder may lead to. Now, at an age when youth and luxury allow Lily and Amanda safety, they have nothing to lose. To them, imagining a world with everything to lose is impossible. They have grown so emotionally detached to modern consumerism, it almost seems as if murdering Mark comes from a place of boredom. They’re so set on losing everything, they don’t stop to ask themselves, is everything worth losing when you have nothing to gain?
Finley presents the moral ambiguity of the upper class in a neat package. The coming of age noir is told through unique, and clean, storytelling, fragmented in to four separate chapters. Presented on a silver platter, he offers the audience a meal that has been cooked to perfection. A book that may remain on a library shelf to be read again and again. How polished the story is lends to its mayhem, mirroring how transactional the entire movie is. Paired with music that sounds like an off-key opera, the visual title frames flashing each Chapter comes at crucial moments, pointing to peak moments between the girls. The shift indicates growth, specifically in Lily, who has become undone by the end of Chapter Three. Although Amanda has seemingly remained an emotionless blob her entire life, admitting she wasn’t genuinely sad at Lily’s father’s funeral, Lily has changed, giving in to the emotionally driven yet stone cold archetype she was destined to be. The movie shifts in to its final act and here, the two have become one in the same. As Chapter Four unfolds, Lily watches Mark play tennis overhead completely detached from reality. She is no longer the emotional refined woman she was at the beginning of the movie. She is now a hysterical, unstoppable train.
When Lily finally kills Mark, we don’t see it, just as we did not see Honeymooners death with Amanda. The murder takes place off screen while Amanda sleeps peacefully on the couch, completely aware Mark’s death will be blamed on her. As Lily shows her first real sign of empathy, letting Amanda know not to drink the orange juice she drugged, we come to the first real turning point of the movie, where everybody must decide how they will grow up. Presented with the opportunity they’ve been waiting for, the crossroads offers responsibility they’ve been seeking the whole movie, to get out of their hamster cage and experience the smell of sawdust as is. The absence of emotion and detachment from real world comes to a screeching halt as real world comes crashing in. Lily must live with the knowledge she is the reason her closest friend is in jail while Amanda must live out her life sentenced to a crime she didn’t commit. Forced with the pain of growing up, the two act so quickly they never consider a life without chaos, insanity, or murder. A life where the two of them redefine their friendship and the positives it could bring.
A life where the horse lives.
Lily and Tim are reunited at the movie’s end, our last onscreen encounter with Anton Yelchin. “It’s only weird if you make it weird,” Amanda tells Tim, bookmarking their end by telling him Amanda wrote her a letter from the psych ward. A letter she never read. In it, Amanda describes two reoccurring dreams she has, one where her head turns in to a horse and one where horses rule the world. Amanda manifests in the form of Honeymooner in the latter, rising high above the world as she stares down at generations of people coming and going. People spending more and more time consumed by modern technology instead of the crumbling society around them. Standing before a photo of the two of them riding horses as children, Amanda details the collapse of humankind and the rise of horses, beautiful and uninhibited. Universally, the horse is a symbol of freedom and restraint and here Amanda is finally free, fit to live her bleak life in the bleak halls of a correctional facility while Lily lives life outside. A life, she recognizes to Tim, that is finally perfect on paper. A life that thrives off the back of the sacrificial Amanda.
A life where the horse never stood a chance.