Sundance 2022: God’s Country, Emily the Criminal, Resurrection | Festivals & Awards

There’s a similar bone-deep frustration embedded in John Patton Ford’s “Emily the Criminal,” another thriller about a woman pushed into behavior that she never could have imagined she would partake in. Less successful overall, it’s still worth seeing because of the driven performance from Aubrey Plaza, who has never been better. If anything, the film sometimes struggles to match what she’s giving it. She sometimes seems more ready to jump into the deep end regarding the horrors of the gig economy and the ruthlessness of her character than the film around her. It’s a force of nature performance in a film that sometimes feels a little too breezy.

Emily has thousands of dollars of student debt, a minor criminal record, and a series of mediocre jobs. When one of her colleagues tells her she could earn $200 in an hour if she texts a number, she takes the opportunity, meeting a petty criminal named Youcef (a charismatic Theo Rossi). He’s the middleman for a credit card fraud operation, and Emily is going to be one of the couriers. She takes a stolen number, buys something with it, returns the product, and gets paid for her trouble. It’s pretty easy, actually—depressingly so for anyone who’s ever suffered credit card fraud themselves. However, Youcef and Emily start to take bigger risks as he basically trains her in his job, and she becomes more of a minor player in this new kind of illegal gig economy and a key figure in a growing criminal underworld.

At first, “Emily the Criminal” seems like a classic story of a good person who gets in over her head in rising waters, but it’s not exactly that movie. Every time that Emily faces a threat, Plaza smartly hesitates to show the severity of the situation, and then pushes Emily through it. She’s a model of the modern gig worker, someone who is constantly having to think on the fly, make decisions reactively to meet the demands of the job. It’s a fearless performance and I wished that the world around Emily felt a little richer and a little more dangerous to match it, but Emily is going to be one of the most unforgettable characters of the year. I kind of can’t wait for people to meet her.