Crazy and Crazier: "Villains" an offbeat, demented little delight with delicious performances

Villains (2019)

89 min.

Release Date: September 20, 2019 (Wide)

The pitch-black comedy “Villains” throws two inept criminal lovers into the home of two unstable Ozzie and Harriet types, not far astray from the late Wes Craven’s deliciously weird 1991 horror gem “The People Under the Stairs” or even Fede Alvarez’s 2016 nerve-shredder “Don’t Breathe.” Writer-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (2015’s “Body”) do deliver their own offbeat, demented delight, a four-character chamber piece locked inside a single location, that is never obvious from scene to scene. “Villains” might not amount to much beyond an oddball genre exercise in the long run, but while one is in it for 89 minutes, the four actors are so game that they keep the ball rolling.

On the lam and en route to Florida, felonious lovebirds Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) and Jules (Maika Monroe) run out of gas not long after barely being able to rob a convenience store. On the side of the road, they spot a nearby house to break into and hopefully siphon gas or steal a new car. While snooping around, Mickey and Jules discover a young girl chained up in the basement. Jules wants to save the girl, but the chipper owners, George (Jeffrey Donovan) and Gloria (Kyra Sedgwick), come home, and they’re a deceptively dangerous couple. Jules doesn’t want to leave the child behind, but she and Mickey are just petty, none-too-bright criminals up against two villains with twisted plans of their own.

In a refreshing counterpoint to the Stephen King monsters he’s been typecast as lately, Bill Skarsgård (2019’s “It: Chapter Two”) hijacks the entire film with a comically inspired performance as Mickey. Maika Monroe (2019’s “Greta”) makes for a sweet foil as Jules, and together, the actors make an adorably bumbling and desperate but believable couple in love who have enough charm that the viewer doesn’t want anything bad to happen to them. Jeffrey Donovan (2019’s “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile”) and Kyra Sedgwick (2016’s “The Edge of Seventeen”) play their roles so big with Southern drawls that they come off like sinister cartoons misplaced in time as would-be nuclear married couple George and Gloria. Sedgwick eventually gains more sympathy and layers than Donovan, but it’s fun watching them both go for it. 

Talkier than one might be expecting, as if it were adapted from a play, “Villains” still affords its actors plenty of snappy, playful dialogue, along with a timelessness from the production design to its overall screwball sensibility. The filmmaking is controlled, and there is some inspiration in the camerawork, like Jules’ “car wash” in which she swishes her long hair across Mickey’s face and the framing of Jules shimmying up a laundry shoot to escape. Again, “Villains” has its own breezy yet darkly funny and dialogue-heavy rhythms, but once you get on its wavelength, it’s a hoot watching a dim couple try to outsmart a couple of psychos.

Grade: B