Review: Meet the Peewee Nihilists of ‘Thoroughbreds’

“Thoroughbreds” opens on an ominous, murkily lit scene — a girl, a horse and a worryingly sharp knife — that telegraphs just how ugly things are going to get in this movie. You learn in short order that the horse is a goner, and it isn’t long into this slick, shallow movie that you wish the girl, Amanda (Olivia Cooke), was, too. This is no fault of Cooke, an appealing performer (she was the girl in “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”). She and her equally likable co-star, Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”), have been burdened with giving their matching ciphers flesh and a reason for us to watch.

Taylor-Joy plays Lily, a wealthy teenager who is tutoring Amanda when the story begins. Amanda, who’s more middle-class comfortable, knows that Lily is getting paid for her attention, which doesn’t stop the girls from curiously circling each other. They were once friends and soon ease into a new, unpersuasive intimacy (they watch Shirley Temple on TV), largely so writer-director Cory Finley can make them combust. What happens next is pretty much what you would expect from peewee nihilists (“Heathers”) adrift in a bourgeois hellscape of quiet dinners and symmetrical visuals (“American Beauty”).

Making his feature directing debut, Finley gives the movie a professional sheen and gets fine performances from his actors, including Anton Yelchin as a sad sack with a bull’s-eye where his brains should be, and Paul Sparks as Lily’s chilled-to-the-bone stepfather. Nothing these two characters do or say is surprising. Yet both actors give their roles a spark of life — Yelchin lends the movie heart in one of his final performances, Sparks gives it a touch of realistic cunning — that let you see where this movie might have gone if Finley hadn’t relied on formula.

For all the chatter and intrigue, Finley never settles on a point or theme. At times, he seems invested in performing a cultural autopsy on Lily and Amanda, opening them up so we can see the pathologies crawling inside. At other times, he seems to want us to see them as symptoms of a larger malady, which doubtless accounts for the scene in which a wealthy woman idles in a tanning bed that looks like a coffin. The ostensibly comic images of the workers laboring at Lily’s palatial digs are presumably meant to say something, too, although their marginality here says less about their employers than it does about the filmmaker.

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“Thoroughbreds”

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.