The title of The Wasp refers to tarantula hawk wasps. You know the name because of Wild Acre Brewing’s red ale. I actually have a colony of tarantula hawk wasps outside my house, but since these burrowing insects are not native to southern Britain, this British movie explains to its audience how these creatures prey on tarantulas. (When they sting people, it causes a few minutes’ worth of the worst pain one can feel. There are YouTube videos of people being stung. They’re impressive.) The tarantula hawk makes a potent metaphor in this two-handed thriller that opens this week. Much like It Ends With Us, this film is about cycles of abuse, but it’s much the better movie thanks to its two powerhouse lead performances, and it deserves better than the single showing per day it’s getting at AMC Grapevine Mills, which is the one place in Tarrant County to see it.
Heather Warren (Naomie Harris) is a rich housewife who has hit the bad husband trifecta with her husband Simon (Dominic Allburn), a drunk who beats her and cheats on her with other women. She tracks down her long-lost classmate Carla Jackson (Natalie Dormer) and offers her a £10,000 cash down payment to murder Simon, knowing that Carla is deep in debt. Heather recalls Carla’s messed-up childhood and thinks it just might make her into a capable and willing killer for hire.
Dormer fairly dominates the early going in this film because she’s cast so far against type. She’s playing a coarse supermarket checkout clerk who smokes cigarettes while she’s seven months pregnant with her fifth child. It’s a far cry from the polished aristocratic women she played on Game of Thrones and The Tudors.
The movie is adapted by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm from her similarly titled stage play, and while I was expecting a plot twist — after all, if the murder goes off smoothly, we have no movie — I was not expecting the one here. Oh, is it ever mean. It also allows the Oscar nominee Harris to take control, and she’s particularly haunting during a late monologue as Heather recalls Carla’s involvement in an incident during their girlhood that went way beyond schoolyard bullying.
This is the first film in English by Guillem Morales, and I regret to say that I haven’t seen any of the movies he directed in his native Spain. His setting the first act on the streets of Bath is rather transparently an attempt to open up the action, though the city’s Georgian architecture does make an effective backdrop for the two women getting back together after years apart. Rather, what keeps The Wasp from becoming stagey are the performances by Harris and Dormer as they give Malcolm’s dialogue the spark of real-life conversation and capture the shift in power between them. Decades-old issues irrupt into the present, and so the tarantula hawk lures more than one spider into her lair with enviable cleverness.
The Wasp
Starring Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer. Directed by Guillem Morales. Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, based on her own play. Rated R.
