On the face of it, Lucy does not seem like the kind of person who would go on a spiritual retreat. She’d probably agree with that herself. But she’d like to be, and so she struggles through the enforced silences and the sharing sessions, hoping to attain a kind of enlightenment she doesn’t really believe in. An embittered former teen actor, played by Jennifer Connelly with the scorched, brittle air of one steadily checking out of polite society, her thorny aura is an ill fit for the expensive Oregon sanctuary she’s signed up for, all hushed meditation and touchy-feely trust exercises, and this energy-based conflict gives Alice Englert‘s strange, alluring satirical drama “Bad Behaviour” an immediate pull of intrigue — vibes so discordantly violent, one feels they have to give way to something physical and drastic.
At the film’s rough midpoint, they do — in ways that confirm the startling, admirable severity and bluntness of Englert’s first feature as a director, and also bring it to a head that its slightly softer, more conventionally oddball second half can’t live up to. At first the film alternates the stories of Lucy and her adult daughter Dylan (played by Englert herself) to form a bifurcated portrait of women whose desires are increasingly incompatible with their chosen environment; once it brings the characters together, for a study of wary family bonding under dire circumstances, it loses its crisp dramatic and thematic definition. Still, this is an original and auspicious work from the New Zealander — carrying at least some shared DNA with the ashy black comedy of early films by Englert’s mother Jane Campion (who makes a brief cameo appearance here).
“Bad Behaviour” is notable, too, as an unusually rangy and risky showcase for Connelly, an actor who may have recently scored career-high box office in “Top Gun: Maverick,” but whose pensive, nervy screen presence has been too rarely tested by Hollywood in the two decades since she won an Oscar for “A Beautiful Mind.” Here, she’s subtly but vividly agitated from the jump, already bristling with quiet malaise and discomfort in her own skin when we meet her driving to Oregon, calling Dylan from the car to warn her that she’s going to be out of reach for, well, however long a paid-for epiphany takes to arrive. Dylan, a movie stuntwoman at work on a shoot in New Zealand, sounds neither surprised nor concerned: The dispassionate tone between them makes clear that mother and daughter are at least alike in their self-containment.
The retreat is both spartan and elevated, presided over by a spiritual leader — the unprepossessingly named Elon — who’s disarmingly straightforward, but also serene in a way that suggests some manner of superior knowledge. Eschewing cult-leader cliché for a plummy everyday friendliness that eventually circles round to sinister, Ben Whishaw cleverly plays Elon as equal parts guru and grifter: His counsel is sometimes obvious, but what the person needs to hear just the same. Englert’s script avoids easy mockery of spiritual seeking and those who pursue it, but does find cool, splintery comedy in the notion of one-size-fits-all therapeutic techniques, which alienate Lucy further from a group in which she already feels unsettled.
The bulk of her aggravation lands, not entirely undeservingly, on new arrival Beverly (a canny Dasha Nekrasova), a vacuous celebrity model who openly fears the loss of her youth and influence; as someone now shorn of both, Lucy can offer her harsher home truths than Elon. Beginning as passive-aggressive before the “passive” part is rather boldly chipped away, this flinty, often very funny standoff between the two women gives Lucy’s half of the narrative a snap and tension that Dylan’s, mostly revolving around her tentative romance with unavailable actor Elmore (Marlon Williams), lacks. But the two portraits are complementary nonetheless, each perceptive about the balance women are expected to find between emotional honesty and smiling reserve. Simon Price’s curt editing sharply exposes these parallels, while Matt Henley’s chilly, misty lensing often situates mother and daughter in the same light and air, even as they’re supposedly half a world apart. (The whole production was, in fact, shot in New Zealand.)
Following the film’s exhilaratingly unexpected climax, Lucy and Dylan’s eventual reunion turns it into a staider, talkier affair. But even then, some of the talk is witty and instructive, building toward a resolution that, if not happy, feels conciliatory and hard-earned, while true to its characters’ flaws and vanities. “You’re going to have to forgive me,” Lucy says to her daughter, “and then forgive yourself for taking so long to forgive me.” Spiritual enlightenment thus juts up against toxic narcissism — recognizing that people can only change so much, Englert’s debut finds what crumpled catharsis it can in the best of their bad moments.
