The new film Electra wants to join the ranks of the Deceitful Guest Crashing the Party genre established in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn (which is really just Ripley), and Performance.
It starts off sassy: stylish graphics in the opening credits, characters introduced with freeze frames and name labels. The staging is clever, and there’s an ersatz music video. We watch pretty rich people living decadent lifestyles in Rome. Electra promises a romp with polyamorous couplings.
Journalist Dylan (if that’s his real name) and “girlfriend/third eye” Lucy meet up with celebrity Milo in Rome for an interview. Milo is charming, foppish, and flaky. He has a partner with benefits, Francesca. The pair is all over each other in a restaurant. They invite Dylan and Lucy for a weekend at Milo’s country estate.
What Milo and Francesca don’t know is that Dylan is not who he claims to be. He has an agenda: a heist. He’s there to steal a valuable painting of a unicorn sitting on a chair. “Only a true, pure soul can be a unicorn,” says Milo. “Like me,” says Francesca. What they don’t know is that Dylan is also there to avenge a woman named Electra.
The film Electra wants to be kinky, but runs out of steam. Or nerve. Innuendos are cast, games are played, and beds are swapped. So why, looking back at its many antics, do I only remember the characters sitting down, talking?
The proceedings wind down as the film goes on. Even an eleventh-hour LSD trip doesn’t liven things up. What starts out as sturdy and confident filmmaking, putting us right in the middle of extravagant experience, ends up in long shot, timidly observing. At the end, the most flash it can muster is (spoiler alert) the screen going red when somebody is stabbed.
The actors are appealing. Daryl Wein as Dylan is a convincing Everyman: his confusion masks a deeper avarice. As Milo, Jack Farthing has a sinewy rock star charm. The women fare less well: Maria Bakalova’s Francesca displays a surprise prudery, while Abigail Cowen plays Lucy as a superficial flake. Her role is underwritten, and maybe unnecessary.
Electra is the first feature by director Hala Matar, who is listed as one of three writers in the screenplay, besides Paul Sado and Daryl Wein. Looks like they plotted it out to be an impressive first feature, but had trouble pulling all the threads. They plant clues (the sexual libertines have a painting of a unicorn; get it?), Milo makes furtive phone calls, Francesca whirls around Lucy, donning masks and enticing her to cavort topless in the backstreets of Rome.
But all those are just red herrings, distracting us from the illogic and incoherence of the plot. Sadly, for all its promise, Electra falls short of a passion project.
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Electra. Directed by Hala Matar. 2024. From Level 33 Entertainment. Runtime 86 minutes. Available on VOD.