DARK UGLY PLACES

In Mansour’s thriller, a woman seeks vengeance against a Hollywood actor who committed a hit-and-run—even if it means making her own difficult life worse.

Nicola Holiday is struggling from a recent car accident that killed her husband, Ben, and left her and her teenage daughter, Emmy, physically and emotionally scarred. Nicola’s injured leg resulted in her losing her high-paying job, also putting the family in financial straits. By contrast, Bambi Redfern’s life seems idyllic: She’s a model who’s married to a famous movie actor, Jason Redfern, and lives in a large, beautiful house in Beverly Hills. But Bambi’s career and marriage are foundering. She’s emaciated from extreme dieting, and her volatile husband frequently has affairs with his co-stars. Like Nicola, Bambi takes pills to help her cope, but something more salient may connect the two women; Nicola is convinced that Jason was behind the wheel of the white Rolls-Royce that plowed into her family and drove away, apparently unconcerned by the destruction he’d wrought. She’s determined to get revenge, even if it means enlisting the help of a dark, shadowy figure who’s gone too far in the past—one who resides deep within herself. Mansour has created a grim, claustrophobic world, populated by people struggling against their bonds, and these battles give the characters an unexpected depth. Bambi could easily have been portrayed as a smug caricature, like her nepo-baby friend Whitney, but she’s effectively shown to be wrestling with aging and weakened by loneliness; indeed, Bambi finds that “most things don’t register as happiness within her.” Nicola and Emmy both contend with tangible physical pain, but they also suffer in subtler ways, as when Nicola’s past childhood traumas resurface. The sunny skies of Los Angeles also mask an underlying spiritual bleakness; Emmy, for instance, loves watching a Hollywood-based YouTube channel that lets viewers virtually stalk celebrities. In one scene, after a photo shoot on a tawdry, drug-infested stretch of Venice Beach, Bambi smells the sublime fragrance of jasmine—but such brief moments of lightness soon disappear in the waves of darkness that pummel the characters.

A suspenseful and relentless tale of troubled Californians.