Homewrecker (2020)
86 min.
Release Date: July 7, 2020 (On Demand)
Avoidance of confrontation and social interaction with a stranger. Denial, the green-eyed monster, and living in the past. Debuting feature director Zach Gayne’s darkly comic two-hander “Homewrecker” does explore those themes through two very different women in a distaff, micro-budget variation on “Misery” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” with recognizable shades of 2014’s unpredictable “Proxy” and 2019’s delightfully nutty “Greta.” From a script Gayne co-wrote with actresses Alex Essoe and Precious Chong, the film is constructed as an intimate two-hander predominantly confined to one house and set over the course of one day that it wouldn't be hard to see “Homewrecker” in lights on stage in an off-off-Broadway theater.
Passive interior designer Michelle (Alex Essoe) is trying to get pregnant with her carriage-shy husband, but in the moment, she’s also just trying to get some work done one late morning in a coffee shop. The extremely friendly Linda (Precious Chong) walks in, recognizes that they both take the same exercise classes, and invites herself over to sit with Michelle. Incapable of taking a hint with no sense of what personal space looks like, Linda’s conversation borders on invasive, making Michelle clearly uncomfortable. Once the stranger convinces Michelle should decorate her home and spontaneously invites her over to take a look, Linda insists they have a drink before noon, and though Michelle keeps telling her that she has to go, Linda pushes and guilt trips her into staying to watch a movie in the afternoon (“It’s like playing hooky”). A bonk on the head and a dose of truth-telling sodium thiopental later, Michelle is a prisoner in this unhinged woman’s home.
“Homewrecker” shifts from cringe comedy, approaching "Chuck & Buck" levels of social discomfort, to straight-on psycho stalker thriller and then a darkly farcical catfight that culminates with a severed tongue and other violence. Until the situation turns out to be centered on a man, the dynamic between Michelle and Linda is interesting to watch. Alex Essoe (2019's "Doctor Sleep") is perfectly sympathetic as Michelle, a people-pleaser who doesn’t want to offend anyone, but the much splashier role goes to Precious Chong, daughter of Tommy Chong of “Cheech & Chong” fame. Chong is wonderfully demented and always captivating, channeling her inner Bette Davis or Joan Crawford with intense eye contact for the bright-on-the-outside but cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs Linda. Some will say her performance is too much, but Chong pitches it just right in playing a woman-child full of malice; as much of a pathetic, delusional nut job as Linda is, Chong still finds moments of subtly raw emotion and sympathy by playing her as a lonely soul who’s needy and stuck in the past.
First and foremost, “Homewrecker” feels like a performance exercise. There is a calm, nervously amusing and affectingly performed scene where Linda makes Michelle play an ‘80s board game called “Party Hunks," and they may or may not begin to relate to each other. In a weird interlude where Linda breaks the fourth wall and performs her own karaoke-style music video of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” Precious Chong makes it uncomfortably funny and chilling. Director Zach Gayne employs split screens and a lot of close-ups, but those flourishes work compared to sprinkled cutaways to seemingly random pink-hued soap bubbles from a bath bomb and an offbeat, psychedelic score. “Homewrecker” is quite brief and looks like it was made over a weekend for less than a $1,000, and yet that’s part of its cracked charm.
Grade: B -
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