The sociopathic elite haven’t changed much since the 1980s—or at least, there are still people willing to take Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero as a trenchant critique rather than a zeitgeist-y piece of knee-to-the-gut prose. Thus, riding out of Sundance, comes Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds, about two teenage friends (Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy) who plan to murder the latter’s stepfather.

In part, they do so because the stepfather is an unpleasant man. But it’s more because, ensconced in a world of privileges, the anti-heroines are too affluent, too imbalanced, or too disaffected to have much perspective on human life. Cooke’s character is recovering from a scandalous, rumor-inducing breakdown. Taylor-Joy appears to have more composure, but can’t hold it for long. And the film that unfolds is less a valuable examination of American wealth than a dour, self-serious take on a soap opera staple: beautiful rich people doing awful things. From the dialogue alone, you can tell that the action is set somewhere in Connecticut or near Westchester County. I grew up in one and went to high school in the other, and god knows there’s enough material there to keep a satirist busy for a lifetime. But this particular cinematic murder is so very high-concept in its construction, so surface-level in its observation, and simultaneously so vague in its central metaphor and so unsubtle in its overall meaning.

What remains, then, is the simple pleasure of a plot that keeps you wondering who will be killed and whether anyone will face the consequences—and that simple pleasure is not unsatisfying. Between Cooke as the psycho version of the sarcastic girl you always kind of liked in high school and Taylor-Joy looking perpetually like she knows something she won’t say, the two have an icily engaging chemistry. The film needs their bond, because that bond is far sturdier and more human than the plot mechanics. The rest is filmmaking craft that generates mood from very few moving parts, but whose aspirations still lean towards knee-to-the-gut bluntness and whose aim is less than precise. It is a movie—a real movie-movie, with technique, contrivances, and all—that struggles with whether it is, or wants to be, or should be, as detached from the world as its subjects.

✬✬✬✩✩

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Thoroughbreds is now available on Blu-ray and as a digital rental. It’s always nice to have noir where you grew up.