The Wasp2024.

Director: Guillem Morales.
With Naomie Harris, Natalie Dormer and Dominic Allburn.

SUMMARY:

Guillem Morales’ The WaspIn “The Last Man,” the film adaptation of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s acclaimed play of the same name, depressed housewife Heather approaches her former childhood friend Carla with a proposition: she wants her to help kill her husband.

Trapped in a loveless marriage and unable to conceive a child, Heather (Naomie Harris) is introduced to the audience as a lonely, trapped, desperate woman with nowhere else to turn. But she lives a wealthy lifestyle and has money in abundance, while pregnant Carla (Natalie Dormer), her hotheaded former classmate, works at a supermarket checkout and lives in a small apartment with her husband and three children, seemingly making her the ideal candidate for a quick payday. But as the film progresses, it becomes clear that there is more to these two characters – and their shared past – than first meets the eye.

Adapting a stage play for the cinema is always a challenge, and Morales largely succeeds. The use of flashbacks to bring Heather and Carla’s shared past to life – lighting and sound present some scenes as suspenseful horror – is particularly clever, as we learn more little by little each time. One of the more vivid scenes in the film is Heather’s first reunion with Carla, as the two women walk and talk purposefully, giving the scene an unstoppable energy and urgency as the stakes get higher and higher.

The film really gets going when the two leads start hatching their plan; a really funny observation of two normal, everyday women trying to do something completely out of their comfort zone, cleverly played to convey the feeling of two old friends getting back together but also to relax the audience just as things take a dark turn. The shift in narrative and power in this scene is both surprising and admirable – simply put, The Wasp is a film that is best watched with little prior knowledge of the details.

The film is both a suspenseful, gripping and darkly comic thriller and an insightful look at childhood trauma and the scars it can leave behind. Heather and Carla both had very different upbringings but experienced their own difficulties growing up; issues that neither fully understood at the time but which came between them and affected their lives in the years that followed. The Wasp is about how pain and anger can make each of us do things we could never have imagined.

Dormer is the standout performer here, delivering perhaps the best performance of her career as Carla, who is at once likable and unlikable, funny and annoying, accessible and repulsive. It’s a difficult balance, but it’s a task she pulls off brilliantly. Harris is also successful as Heather, switching between different character traits in a way that never feels jarring, and the pair have excellent chemistry that keeps the film alive.

There are moments in the film that don’t always work. Some lines of dialogue seem a little more intrusive and silly in the medium of cinema than they might have done on the stage, and have the undesirable effect of slowing the film down and making us feel like we are just watching a filmed recording of the play. But these moments are few and far between. Most of the time The Wasp is a surprising and clever thriller with insightful thematic undertones, clever direction from Morales – whose work on Inside No. 9 makes him the perfect cast for the more claustrophobic scenes in the third act – and the outstanding leading roles of Harris and Dormer make the work something special.

SEE ALSO: Exclusive Interview – Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer talk about The Wasp

Assessment of the flickering myth – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Cinema: ★ ★ ★

Daniel Barnes

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