Review of Suburbicon (2017) by Patricia W — 22 Mar 2018

An all white suburban neighbour hood in the 1950s is shaken up by the arrival of a black family whilst their neighbours delve deeper and deeper into the sinister after a home invasion.

This film had so much potential, you have Matt Damn and Julianne Moore as the main protagonists, Gardner Lodge and his sister in law Margaert, who have proven again and again to be great actors but they are woefully underserved by the script. Most of the characters are 2 dimensional cardboard cut outs except for Nicky, the young boy who is very well acted by Noah Jupe and Roger, the insurance claimant who is completely brought to life by Oscar Isaac. Karimah Westbrook and Leith M. Burke on the other hand are completely side lined as the Mayers, who don't enough screen time and who's much more interesting story is left as an afterthought.

The main problem with this film is its mish mash of tones and plots. This is literally like two different scripts have been crammed together into one film and it doesn't work at all. On the one hand you have a rather unimaginative dark 'comedy' where a man and his sister in law have murdered his wife to get the insurance money and on the other you have extreme racial prejudice based on the true story of a black family moving into a white idyllic neighbourhood in the 1950s and being harassed and attacked by everyone around them. This could have been a great dark comedy but the film doesn't know what tone to choose, is it serious? Comedic? An observation on racism? It can't seem to pick one and so it fails at all three.

The pace is also painfully slow and even when there was action happening on screen I found myself unutterably bored because the murder, insurance story is so predictable and all of its attempts at comedy fall completely flat.

The sets and the costumes for the time period are well done and the cinematography is fine but not enough to make up for the plot.

I wouldn't recommend for anyone to watch this film. Try and watch Fargo and The Help at the same time and you'll get roughly the same head ache inducing effect.