117 min | PG | July 1, 2022 | Bleecker Street
A wealthy bachelor keeps a secret list of qualities his future wife must possess. A spurned woman decides to manufacture the perfect candidate and watch him fall. The trap is sharper than the man who set the rules.
Mr. Jeremy Malcolm is the most eligible bachelor in Regency London. He carries a private list of requirements that no woman has met. Julia Thistlewaite fails his standards on their first date and decides to humiliate him for it. She recruits her childhood friend Selina Dalton to play the flawless woman Malcolm wants, then expose his arrogance once he falls. The film is a courtship comedy about the lists people keep and the cost of measuring other people against them.
Freida Pinto plays Selina with a steady warmth that makes the deception harder to sustain. She is supposed to perform perfection and instead keeps revealing a real person underneath the act. Sopé Dirísù plays Malcolm as a man who mistakes his standards for principles. He delivers his demands with such certainty that the comedy comes from watching that certainty crack. Zawe Ashton plays Julia with wounded vanity and gives the scheme its engine. Theo James and Ashley Park fill out the social world as Captain Henry Ossory and Gertie Covington, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays Lord Cassidy as the reluctant middleman caught between the plotters.
Emma Holly Jones directs from Suzanne Allain’s adaptation of her own novel. The production design does the heavy lifting. The estates and ballrooms are dressed with a richness that gives the courtship room to breathe, and the costumes mark each character’s status without a line of dialogue. Jones stages the dinner-party set pieces as social combat where seating and glances carry the tension. The diverse ensemble is cast without comment, and the film treats that choice as ordinary rather than as a statement.
This is a competent Regency romance that hits every beat the genre demands. The misunderstanding builds, the deception unravels, and the lovers arrive where the form requires them to arrive. Jones and Allain execute the conventions cleanly without bending them into anything new. The pleasure here is the pleasure of a well-set table. It satisfies because you already know the meal.