104 min | R | May 7, 2021 | Lionsgate
An FBI agent posts up in a dying Kentucky coal town and leans on a local woman to make his first big case. She gives him everything and expects a way out. He gives her a federal paycheck and a problem he needs to make disappear.
Susan Smith lives in Pikeville, Kentucky, where the mines are closing and the only growth industry is OxyContin. She has two kids, an ex-husband who deals, and no exit. Mark Putnam arrives as the first FBI agent ever stationed in the county, ambitious and out of his depth. He recruits Susan as an informant, then sleeps with her, and the affair becomes the case that makes his career and ends her life. The film wants to be a portrait of Appalachian rot and the bureaucratic men who feed on it, but it keeps reaching for the safer shape of a fatal-attraction thriller.
Emilia Clarke plays Susan with a flattened drawl and bad teeth and a desperation that never tips into self-pity. She makes Susan smart enough to know she is being used and broke enough to take the deal anyway. Jack Huston plays Mark Putnam as a careerist who mistakes his own weakness for love, and his blandness is the point even when it deadens the scenes. Johnny Knoxville turns up as Cash, Susan’s ex, with a scuzzy menace that the rest of the film cannot match. Thora Birch gets a few sharp beats as Jolene. Clarke carries the picture because everyone around her is playing a type and she is playing a person.
Phillip Noyce directs from a Chris Gerolmo screenplay adapted from Joe Sharkey’s book, and he frames the true story through Susan’s voiceover narration from beyond the grave. That choice telegraphs the ending in the first scene and drains the suspense out of every threat that follows. The cinematography goes gray and washed-out to sell the poverty, and the effect is more illustrative than felt. Noyce made Dead Calm and Rabbit-Proof Fence and knows how to build dread out of confinement. Here he settles for coverage and lets the score do the menacing.
The real story is brutal and specific, about how an institution sends a man into a place it does not understand and rewards him for what he extracts from it. The film has that story in its hands and keeps trading it for genre beats. Susan deserves a movie about her, and this one is about the man who killed her and the badge that protected him. Clarke builds a full human being out of the material. The film around her never decides to be as alive as she is.