ELECTRA (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 1, 2025

Co-writer/director Hala Matar's Electra might have worked as a comedy and might have worked as a thriller. The form this movie takes, though, is so uncertain of its tone that the confusion seems to have spread to the material's entire purpose.

The setup suggests either approach could be possible. We meet Dylan (Daryl Wein), a journalist for a music magazine, and Lucy (Abigail Cowen), a photographer. The two have been assigned to create a profile of rock star Milo (Jack Farthing), who's currently spending his days in Rome between gigs and anything else going on in his career, and everything appears to be completely normal under the circumstances. The writer and photographer are awkward and nervous around the singer, and the musician is so caught up in himself and his sense of self-importance that one wonders what a profile of this guy might add to anything—let alone spending an entire movie about an interview with him.

Thankfully, nothing is as it seems with Dylan and Lucy, if those are their real names. They're not. The two are actually Henry and Anna, and they are playing a sort-of medium con, in which they'll get close to Milo, earn his trust or at least play up his ego enough for something equivalent, and steal a valuable painting the musician recently purchased.

This actual premise is more promising, especially because Milo is irritating almost from his first introduction. Because the two thieves aren't professional ones or even amateurs at this sort of thing, the conceit is kind of amusing, too, particularly when Anna gets a good look at the painting in question. It's sizeable and definitely not the sort of thing that's going to be easy to sneak out of the rock star's country villa, where has invited the reporters to stay, or transport in Henry's little car.

The setup is silly enough, highlighted by the presence of Milo's current "number one" girlfriend Francesca (Maria Bakalova). She's a performance artist who seems to exist in her own little world, which means that she doesn't really care that Milo has affairs with multiple women, that she can kind of gauge that something isn't exactly right with "Dylan," and that the story comes to a screeching stop whenever Bakalova has to do some schtick to keep what's a simple, straightforward, and short story going. She's a talented comedic actor, to be sure, but since the character is weird simply for the sake of being weird, the role is transparently a lot of filler.

Francesca also serves as something of a distraction from the real intentions of the screenplay, written by Matar, Paul Sado, and Wein. Yes, there's another secret here, having to do with why Henry is going to such lengths in order to get close to Milo and take something so valuable from him, although we eventually learn that the conman hasn't really done any sort of preparation for or taken any precautions to ensure his phony cover.

That might have played as a fun gag or a tough obstacle in a thriller, but by that point in the script, the movie has mostly shifted tonally toward a more serious goal. Let's just say the painting might not have much monetary value, but it definitely has plenty of the sentimental variety for one of the characters here. It should possess that for two of them, but that's the whole problem that needs to be reconciled or rectified.

Once that's revealed, the entire movie's random playfulness, with Francesca and "Lucy" playing a bunch of theater games (Anna is an aspiring actress, taking this role for the challenge and enough cash to focus on her acting career for a while), and the lighthearted shenanigans of the plot seem even more unmotivated within the story. In reality, this tale is a darker one about the thoughtlessness of fame and one character's drive to punish another. It takes those ideas to such an extreme in the final minutes that it feels as if the screenwriters believed they had been writing an entirely different story up until then.

They haven't, though, so while the story itself offers all the answers for the reason everything happens, whatever movie the filmmakers thought they were making here remains an unanswered question. Electra is an odd mishmash of tones and intentions that's not particularly funny, suspenseful, or convincing.

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