Bad Behaviour Lacks Wit and Bite
The premise for Alice Englert’s Bad Behaviour is an intriguing one. Jennifer Connelly’s Lucy has traveled to a remote part of Oregon for a spiritual retreat led by the mystic Elon Bello (Ben Wishaw). Bello is everything you’d expect from a contemporary spiritual guru: He’s young and charismatic, he’s equally affable and awkward in ways that feel a little too calculated and marketable, and his methodology is much more driven by whims than any sort of program. Lucy is looking for his guidance as she seeks to change, to become a more gentle, more supportive, and more emotionally open person. In particular, she wants these things to help her connect better with her daughter (Alice Englert), a movie stunt coordinator working half a world away.
It’s a setup that could be a rich source of satire, emotional depth, or dark revelations. Unfortunately, the film dawdles in a nowhere land between all of those things. In the end, Bad Behaviour is a lot like its central character: alternatingly arresting and annoying, driven more by severe personality swings than any coherence, and a bit off-putting.
During the first half, the movie focuses on Lucy as a pent up person who thinks this charismatic guru can deliver the silence she needs. Wishaw is pretty fun as Bello, but the plot never substantially interrogates Bello’s purposes or the needs that drive people to seek such belonging. Instead, Bad Behaviour merely distills the cultic sense into lighting so soft and hazy that the actors’ faces are nearly washed out. It’s overdone and not very insightful.
At first we think Lucy’s battling her darker thoughts. Lucy, in fact, revels in those thoughts. Once she begins acting on them, they build a momentum that’s hard to slow down. Connelly’s performance is compelling right up to the crucial moment, at which point it falters and levels off in sporadic tones. When the film most needs solidity to pull the viewer in, it fractures, never regaining its footing.
In that fracturing, it largely abandons the spiritual retreat and every plot thread that went with it, turning to focus on Lucy’s relationship with her daughter, Dylan. There are hints that mother and daughter are seeking different things via the same means. Both enlightenment and career success can be achieved through punishment—whether physical, social, emotional, or spiritual.
But the movie again fails to find any substantial depth in their growth, leaving the entire thing feeling incomplete. Bad Behavior ends up stuck between the quirkiness of Taika Waititi and the perverse satire of Yorgos Lanthimos. The film, however, doesn’t have enough wit or bite to resonate with the best (or even the most middling) films of either director. Englert doesn’t seem rightly committed enough to either. Bad Behaviour is a cringe comedy hinting at a psychological thriller, but it elicits few laughs, the cringes are too forced to cut, and the darkness never metastasizes.
