Margot (Emilia Jones) is an Archaeology student who works evenings in an independent cinema that shows classic & cult movies.
She gets chatting with a regular patron Robert (Nicholas Braun), which turns to flirting and eventually dating.
No good will come of this.
CW: sexual assault, stalking
"Men are afraid women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid men will kill them"
This is a much more interesting take on the "perils of dating" thriller than the Margaret Atwood quote above, which strongly informs it, or my content warning would suggest. Both sides of the Atwood quote are tackled.
Robert is older than Margot, with slightly different cultural touchstones and norms and much funnier by text than in person.
So we get some awkward dating interspersed with imagined scenes sprung from Margot's hopes and fears until it builds to a quite shocking climax that's sadly relies on incongruous violence and an improbable accident.
It's filled with heavy handed symbolism: Margot wears a red coat walking in the dark shortly after talk of "Into the Woods", there's talk about ant colonies, Queen bees and so on.
It remains ambiguous most of the way through and even after the reveal somewhat switches back to that for the penultimate scene.
This looks to have been review-bombed by the manosphere which I don't get as it's a very good stab at unwrapping the messiness of consent and dating and what that looks like to both sides of a breakup.
Flawed but very worth a look, 7/10.