Writer(s): Chirchirillo
Starring: Lili Simmons, Kahyun Kim, Noureen DeWulf, and Jack Cutmore-Scott
David Chirchirillo’s Bad Match
is the kind of thriller where you just get the feeling that nothing
is as cut and dry as it seems. The tale at its center—about a woman
who “falls victim” to a completely consensual one-night stand and
then won’t let go—is as conventional as they come, yet gradually
we begin to realize there might be more to the story. The inevitable
twist is both shocking, and—like the best of them—logical upon
review, ending the film on a strong note. And while its strength
can’t overpower a few weak scenes, Bad Match is still a
movie that is way better than we were expecting.
Harris is a twentysomething hipster who
works at a marketing agency. When he’s not at work, he’s either
playing online video games, or using online dating apps to source
some new pussy. Harris is the perfect kind of douchebag for the
millennial era: good-looking and suave, he has bagging women down to
a science. He is also the master of escape, sneaking out in the
middle of the night to return home in time for a couple hours of
sleep before having to get ready for work.
One night, he “matches” with a girl
named Riley. Upon waking up to find him sneaking out, she attempts to
get him to stay the night. When he refuses, she is more persistent
than the others, although he still manages to worm his way out of it.
That persistence is a little bit of foreshadowing that she’s not
like the other girls, and sees dating apps more for what the name
implies, rather than for what guys like Harris use them for.
The following morning, Harris wakes up
to texts from Riley—they don’t stop when he’s at work, either.
Or when he’s at home trying to get stuff done for a big project
he’s working on…a project that’s forgotten once she sends him a
suggestive picture. That’s all it takes for his annoyance to
disappear, and he invites her over to his place this time, to have
another session of wild intercourse. Bad move.
He has to get up for work. She turned
off the alarm. He has a big meeting that day and is late. Too late,
it turns out. She apologizes. He doesn’t have time to wait for her
to leave, so he bolts off to work in a hurry, assuming she will
follow through on her plan to take an Uber home. But we know things
aren’t going to be that easy for poor Harris; we’re probably the
only ones not shocked when Riley is still at his house when he
returns home.
She continues to call him in the
ensuing days, and he continues to ignore her. Things reach a fever
pitch when she catches him at a bar—on a day he said he was
sick—with a couple of friends, and overhears him describing her as
sad and pathetic, among other things. Understandably, this doesn’t
sit well with her, and she curses him out, swears him off, and storms
out of the door. And this is when things really start to spiral out
of control for poor Harris. He loses his job. He’s arrested on
child pornography charges. Desperate for a confession from Riley to
clear his name, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
Bad Match been declared an
attack on toxic masculinity and dating apps; to agree to the former
argument, one would have to dismiss some truly psychotic behavior
from our “heroine”, yet merely calling it a takedown of dating
app culture oversimplifies the film, calling to mind any number of
tired attacks on the current climate of millennials and internet
dating. Bad Match at least strives to be more than just your
typical “woman goes crazy” thriller, and it largely succeeds,
thanks to great performances from the cast, and the twist that brings
it all together in the end. It’s slightly undone by some truly
unbelievable sequences—as in, completely illogical actions that
detract from the overall believability of the story—but these are
thankfully kept to a minimum.
We had no ideas
of what to expect going into it, with the movie being lumped in the
“You May Also Like” section of Netflix with low-grade
Lifetime-style schlock, but this is at least a suspense film with a
brain.
RATING: 6/10
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