Emily the Criminal - 2022 film review

Emily the Criminal is a fairly recent film which tells a pretty good story while also making some interesting points about modern society. It's all the more effective because those points, although made with clarity, aren't hammered home in a crude and tedious way. Emily is played, exceptionally well, by Aubrey Plaza (the inspiration for whose first name apparently came from a song by Bread). She is a flawed character, to say the least, but Plaza manages to enlist our sympathy for her.

Emily is weighed down by student debt. It's very sad that, around the world, there are many people like Emily, who have in effect been conned into taking out heavy student loans only to wind up in jobs that are less than rewarding. At the start of the film, we see Emily caught out in a lie to a prospective employer, and later in the story we see a ruthless employer trying to get her to do a six month unpaid internship.

Although Emily is driven to try to make a better life for herself, she finds herself lured into criminality in order to make it happen. We may not approve, but the script is good enough to make us understand and - at some points, anyway - root for her. John Patton Ford, who wrote and directed the movie, is a real talent.

Emily gets involved with a couple of brothers who are involved in credit card scams. She proves herself to be alarmingly adept at lying and cheating her way out of trouble, but there are occasional dark moments which get darker as the film goes on. From start to finish, we see people making 'bad choices'. I don't think this film sets out to justify crime, but it does quite a good job of showing how so many get sucked into it. Thought-provoking.