105 min | R | September 25, 2020 | Focus Features
Old Dolio Dyne has spent twenty-six years as the third member of her parents’ grifting operation. A charming stranger joins the crew and accidentally shows her what affection looks like. Miranda July turns a small-time heist movie into the story of a woman robbed of love her entire life.
Old Dolio Dyne is twenty-six and has never been loved. Her parents raised her as a junior partner in their grift, not as a daughter. Miranda July builds a film around a family of small-time con artists who steal mail, run refund scams, and dodge an overdue rent bill. The real subject is emotional poverty. Old Dolio has been taught that affection is a transaction, and she has never once been on the receiving end of it.
Evan Rachel Wood plays Old Dolio with a low flat voice and a hunched, sliding walk. She hides behind a curtain of hair and flinches whenever anyone reaches for her. Wood strips out every trace of vanity and builds a person who has been starved of warmth since birth. Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger play Robert and Theresa as parents who weaponize their child’s need. They are not cartoon villains. They are people who decided long ago that love is a liability, and Gina Rodriguez plays Melanie Whitacre as the outsider whose casual warmth exposes everything the Dynes have withheld.
Miranda July writes and directs with control over every small gesture. The family squats in a cheap office next to a bubble factory. Pink foam seeps through the wall twice a day, and they wipe it down like a routine chore. July uses that recurring image to make their squalor both absurd and strangely tender. She stages the biggest emotional turns in the most mundane settings possible. A gas station bathroom, a stranger’s apartment, the back seat of a car.
This is a film about a person learning that she deserved better. Old Dolio spends the story discovering that the bond she was denied is something she can reach out and claim. July refuses easy sentiment and earns the feeling anyway. The con-artist plot is only the frame. The real heist is one woman stealing back the right to be loved, and July keeps the deadpan surface intact while the ache builds underneath it.