FFF Review: NANCY, PLEASE

When Paul (Will Rogers) finally moves in with his longtime girlfriend, Jen (Rebecca Lawrence), it marks not only the beginning for him, but an end--specifically the end of his co-habitation with his roommate, the titular character (Eleonor Hendricks) in Andrew Semans's debut feature, the moody thriller Nancy, Please.

One problem is that Paul, who is in a special Ph. D  program at Yale, is working on his dissertation on the Dickens novel Little Dorrit and left said book at his old place with Nancy. The other problem is that Nancy is apparently a grade-A bitch. Not that we would know ourselves. Nancy as a character is almost non-existent from the movie and rarely on screen. Virtually all of what we know of her we hear from Paul.

But Paul is slowly descending into madness. Having tried multiple times and multiple ways to get his book back, he becomes increasingly frustrated at his book (which contains, he declares, copious amounts of notes he needs for his thesis) being ostensibly stolen. And because of it, he essentially shuts down the rest of his life and focuses singularly on his being slighted. Jen and his friend Charlie become increasingly angry at him for not letting it go. He stops writing altogether and his professor is considering kicking him out of the program.

Some of Semans' muted palette and sound design manages to successfully create a tone of dread and creepiness while in fact none of that is happening on screen. That's fine--mostly--when this is really just a story of a man spiraling out of control as a result of his own neuroses. The main problem here then is Paul, who is so incessantly whiny that one may begin to hope (as I certainly did) that all the bad, bad things that he obsessively stresses about will happen to him. It's also no help that Rogers plays him relentlessly one-note.

Throughout the film, I kept thinking of how Nancy and Paul are just engaging in child's play, as if the two were at recess and one claimed the other "took my ball and won't give it back." By the end of the movie, when Nancy and Paul finally have it out in the film's climax, that belief almost literally came to fruition, with Nancy playing the schoolyard bully to Paul's ineffectual nerd. It would have been, could have been, an interesting conceit--a parable about adults acting like kids--but the execution is so poor and, frankly, annoying that, like Paul, the movie rides completely off the rails. I'd rather stay home and read Little Dorrit.