Paul Duerson (Raymond Nicholson) has got it bad for world famous pop star and actor Sofia (Samara Weaving). It being the 1990s, he doesn’t have the option of simply being creepy on social media; instead, he takes her hostage and attempts to marry her, as you do, in a period-comedy-horror-thriller that is entertaining enough moment-to-moment, but doesn’t add up anything very substantial overall. Standing in the way of Paul’s deranged scheme is bodyguard Bell (a grounded and nicely judged performance by Eric Dane), and rounding out the men in Sofia’s life is her NBA player boyfriend Rhodes (Jimmie Fails).
Screenwriter Jimmy Warden knows a grabby real-life premise when he sees one. In 1985, a bear ate a massive amount of cocaine and fatally overdosed, leading, in 2023, to the release of the Warden-scripted movie Cocaine Bear. In 1996, Robert Dewey Hoskins was sentenced to 10 years in prison for stalking Madonna, providing the loose inspiration for this latest Warden script, which this time out he has also directed (casting his wife Weaving in the lead role). Warden is not a bad director of individual scenes, with several sequences playing out like miniature music videos, complete with big bold needle-drop choices on the soundtrack. The problem is the overall cohesion, or rather, lack of it – there are plenty of cool ideas, and a narrative that strings them together effectively enough, but it’s unclear what we’re meant to feel about any of it.
Are we supposed to be ironically amused, in a Tarantino-esque emotionally detached way? Or are we supposed to be invested in Sofia as a horror heroine we hope will be able to defeat her captor? Is Paul an antihero in the Rupert Pupkin vein, or a straight-down-the-line killer, or some kind of nice guy underneath it all, with serious mental problems? The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.
Still, it’s all pretty stylishly done, and if you’re thinking Nicholson is a dead ringer for a young Jack Nicholson, we can save you a Google: he’s his son, and doing a nice line in the kind of derangement his dad channelled so memorably in the The Shining.