81 min | R | August 20, 2021 | Lionsgate
Bella Thorne plays a party girl who scams her way into a Jesus-themed money laundering scheme and decides the only way out is to become the next coming of Christ. Janell Shirtcliff stages it as a feature-length perfume ad with a body count. The clothes are the only thing in focus.
Mads is a Los Angeles party girl who drifts through nightclubs, drugs, and bad decisions with a fixation on Jesus. She owes money to dangerous people after a drug deal collapses. Her escape plan is to reinvent herself as a nun and then as a feminized version of Christ himself. Janell Shirtcliff builds the film around a single provocation, which is the image of a young woman dressing up as the Messiah. The provocation is the whole movie. There is nothing underneath it.
Bella Thorne plays Mads as a blank surface that the camera dresses and undresses. She poses, she pouts, and she narrates her own emptiness without ever filling it. Andreja Pejic plays Addy and Libby Mintz plays Evie as accessories to Mads rather than characters with wants of their own. Gavin Rossdale plays Eric the drug boss with the menace of a man reading cue cards. Paris Jackson appears as Jesus in a fantasy that strains for transgression and lands on a fashion shoot. No performance here is allowed to become a person.
Shirtcliff directs her first feature and co-writes the script with Mintz. The cinematography drowns every frame in pink neon and lens flares until the images blur into a single cosmetic haze. The editing cuts on impulse rather than logic, stacking music-video montages where scenes should be. The needle-drop soundtrack runs nonstop and substitutes mood for momentum. Production design loads the screen with crucifixes and glitter, then refuses to say anything about either.
This is a film that mistakes style for a point of view. It wants to channel John Waters and his gleeful blasphemy, but Waters had jokes and conviction. Shirtcliff has neither. Mads tells us she wants to be the new Jesus, and the film never asks why, never finds the satire in the premise, and never commits to the camp. It dresses up as a provocation and forgets to provoke.