90 min | R | December 30, 2022 | Lionsgate
Alice is a woman who has trained herself to disappear. A week away with her two closest friends is supposed to be a break. Instead it becomes the place where the damage finally shows.
Alice is a young woman in a relationship with Simon, an artist who never raises his hand. He controls through guilt, surveillance, and the slow withdrawal of affection. Alice rations her food, monitors her phone, and rehearses her words before she speaks them. The film is about coercive control, the abuse that leaves no marks and produces no easy evidence. Alice, Darling builds its whole case on the small, compulsive behaviors of a person managing a man who is never satisfied.
Anna Kendrick plays Alice as a woman performing calm over panic. She picks at her hair, rehearses sentences, and flinches at every buzz of a phone she cannot ignore. Kendrick strips out the quick wit she usually brings and replaces it with vigilance. Charlie Carrick plays Simon with a soft voice that makes the control harder to name. Wunmi Mosaku plays Sophie as the friend who sees the change and refuses to pretend otherwise. Kaniehtiio Horn plays Tess as a woman whose hurt at being sidelined curdles into fear.
Mary Nighy directs her first feature with a focus on the body. The camera stays close on Kendrick’s hands and face and catches the rituals Alice uses to keep herself contained. Alanna Francis writes a script that withholds the dramatic confrontation an audience expects. The abuse arrives in flashback and in Alice’s behavior rather than in scenes of shouting. That choice keeps the attention on the cost instead of the spectacle. It also leaves the film’s thriller framework thin.
Alice, Darling works as a portrait and falters as a plot. The friendship and the performances give it a center. The story around them stalls and circles when it should tighten. The film understands that escaping coercive control is not a single decision but a slow recovery of the self. It earns that understanding through Kendrick and the two women beside her, and it asks little more of itself than that.