134 min | PG-13 | May 28, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
Cruella is the origin story of the woman who eventually wants to skin puppies for a coat. Disney hands her a tragic backstory, a punk makeover, and Emma Thompson to spar with. The clothes have more personality than the plot.
Estella is an orphan with a gift for design and a head of hair split down the middle in black and white. She grows into a London grifter who runs small cons with two partners and dreams of a place in fashion. A job pulls her into the orbit of the Baroness von Hellman, the reigning couturier of 1970s London. Estella uncovers a secret that turns ambition into vengeance, and Cruella is born. The film is a revenge story dressed as a coming-of-age tale, and it argues that reinvention and self-destruction wear the same outfit.
Emma Stone plays Estella and Cruella as two performances stitched into one body. Estella is watchful and wounded. Cruella is loud, cruel, and clearly having more fun, and Stone lets the second personality bleed into the first until the line dissolves. Emma Thompson plays the Baroness von Hellman with glacial contempt and exact comic timing, turning every compliment into a threat. Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry play Horace and Jasper, the loyal accomplices who supply the warmth the lead deliberately withholds. John McCrea plays Artie, a vintage boutique owner who treats fashion as armor.
Craig Gillespie directs the way he directed I, Tonya, with kinetic energy and a wall of needle-drops. Dana Fox and Tony McNamara write a script that prizes one-liners over structure, and McNamara’s taste for venomous wit from The Favourite shows in the duels between Estella and the Baroness. Jenny Beavan’s costumes do the real storytelling. A dress that bursts into flames and a garbage-truck gown that unfurls into couture carry more narrative weight than the dialogue around them. The soundtrack stacks classic rock cues so densely that the music stops underscoring scenes and starts replacing them.
The pleasures here are surface pleasures, and the film knows it. Every frame is designed, and the design is genuinely thrilling. The story underneath is thin, and it stretches a single reveal across two acts that do not need the room. Cruella works best when it abandons the origin-story homework and lets Stone and Thompson circle each other in better and better clothes. It is a fashion show with a plot attached, and the fashion show wins.