Anya Taylor-Joydoesn’t need Satanic goats or a personality-swapping James McAvoy to be unnerving – she’s plenty scary in broad daylight. Give her a palatial Connecticut mansion, a summer with nothing to do, and someone unfortunate enough to get in her way, and she can make a straight-to-camera stare absolutely spine-chilling. Her 2017 underrated indie gem, Thoroughbreds, proves that, asking a thrilling question – what if you stripped away the supernatural and let teenage ennui born of immense privilege fuel the horror?
The film, directed by Cory Finley and also starring House of the Dragon’sOlivia Cooke and the late Anton Yelchin, makes the most of Taylor-Joy’s genetically blessed facial features, tasking her with playing Lily, a polished high schooler with a penchant for existential boredom and moral flexibility. When she connects with the casually sociopathic Amanda (a brilliant Cooke), the two spiral into a darkly comic, morally dubious dance of manipulation and murder plotting, proving that nightmares don’t always need monsters.
Though it’s largely forgotten in the shuffle of her bigger hits, Thoroughbreds illustrates that Taylor-Joy’s steely, wild-eyed intensity didn’t just appear in darker fare like Robert Eggers’ The Witch or M. Night Shyamalan’sSplit. It’s been brewing behind her now iconic knowing gaze for quite some time. Sans forest seances and bunker escapes, the most disturbing role Taylor-Joy has gifted us is simply a restless socialite in a rich zip code with plenty of time – and people – to kill.
How Boredom and Wealth Turn Deadly in ‘Thoroughbreds’
For a thriller so psychologically twisted, Thoroughbreds begins quietly, deceptively so. Lily (Taylor-Joy) and Amanda (Cooke) are high school girls from wealthy Connecticut families whose days are measured in horseback lessons and social expectations. Lily struggles under the thumb of her insufferable stepfather, while Amanda has been ostracized after a disturbing animal cruelty incident hinted at in the film’s opening. The old friends reconnect when Amanda – now medicated and deemed somewhat reformed – is set up with tutoring lessons, a ruse her mother hopes will help her to eventually reacclimate to society. Unfortunately, Lily is just as apathetic and morally hollow as her mentally ill pupil; she’s just better at camouflaging her sociopathy.
The girls’ idle boredom quickly mutates into something darker. They hatch a plan to eliminate the obstacles in their lives, a cost-benefit scenario brainstormed over stolen Merlot and destroyed home gym equipment. Their dry runs are darkly comedic, first involving a hapless local drug dealer (Yelchin) who can’t stand the sight of blood, but despite the bits of black humor, Lily never wavers on her ultimate goal: the permanent removal of an overbearing stepfather who sees her as a prop and nothing more. What unfolds is a tense game of manipulation, strategy, and moral experimentation, all set against the pristine backdrop of a manicured, sunlit world.
And it’s Taylor-Joy’s Lily who both introduces us to, and eventually upends, this perfect prison. Her performance is built entirely on control and calculation. From the moment she appears, Lily seems like a polished, well-mannered teenager, every gesture measured, every expression restrained. In the early scene where Amanda teaches her “the technique” – practicing tears while they watch an old movie in Lily’s immaculately kept living room – Taylor-Joy makes it clear that Lily is absorbing every detail, not out of curiosity, but as a sort of preparation. She is quiet, still, and observant, terrifyingly so. Later, in the poolside scene with her stepfather, Lily’s calm gaze and clipped responses are tinged with menace. The character’s outward passivity is itself a weapon, and the audience slowly realizes that she has been quietly plotting the unthinkable throughout it all.
Cooke’s Amanda provides the spark that sets Lily’s calculations in motion, but her character’s too-obvious villainy is a bait-and-switch. Cooke’s delivery is blunt and unpredictable, her flat affect both funny and alarming… a character unbound by rules. She teaches, challenges, and teases Lily into action, and their chemistry unlocks something dark and strange in both of them. If you’re getting flashes of Heavenly Creatures, just dressed up in Ralph Lauren and The Row, you’re on the right track. But, while Amanda is the agent of disorder, Taylor-Joy’s Lily undergoes the more nightmarish transformation. She begins as a seemingly compliant young woman, content to go along with someone else’s plan for her life, only to hide her budding ruthlessness behind that same shield of serenity. By the end, when the murder of her stepfather has been plotted, botched, and plotted again, Lily is the one fully in control, and that realization is jarring when it comes.
The Role That Defines Anya Taylor-Joy’s Range
The horror in Thoroughbreds doesn’t come from covens, mutant monsters, or split personalities; it comes from something even more insidious: two teenage girls, so detached from reality, so insulated by extreme wealth, that they can easily justify their darkest impulses, as if murder is just a line on a spreadsheet. The way Taylor-Joy plays Lily, like a time bomb ticking its way to step-patricide or a child realizing the quickest path to its wants is through destruction, injects excitement in the film’s final third. Instead of continuing to chafe against the world’s perception of her, Lily wields it, playing the part of a privileged, self-obsessed girl so that she can, literally, get away with murder.
What makes Thoroughbreds worth a re-watch now is that it reads as a blueprint for everything Taylor-Joy would do next. The icy control of The Queen’s Gambit, the dark social satire of The Menu, the unsmiling, unstoppable focus of Furiosa – all of it is here, already visible in Lily’s slow pivot from passive observer to active predator. The film is short, vicious, and deliciously twisted, and it deserves reappraisal as the role that most chillingly captures what makes Taylor-Joy singular: elegance and composure that can easily sour into hair-raising menace.
Throughbreds is available to rent or buy on VOD services.
- Release Date
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March 9, 2018
- Runtime
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92 Minutes
- Director
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Cory Finley
- Writers
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Cory Finley
