Emily the Criminal
Emily the Criminal is a sharp, human descent-into-crime story elevated by Aubrey Plaza at her most committed. Imperfect but essential viewing.
The crime film has always been, at its most honest, a genre about systems rather than individuals. The protagonist's descent is interesting not primarily because of what it reveals about their character but because of what it reveals about the conditions that make that descent possible, the specific intersection of structural disadvantage, institutional indifference, and individual decision-making that produces the moment when a person steps across the line they have spent their whole life treating as fixed. Breaking Bad set the standard for this in the television format across five seasons, establishing Walt's transformation as the product of a healthcare system, a pharmaceutical industry, a professional culture, and a specific form of masculine ego operating simultaneously. Emily the Criminal is working in the same register in about a hundredth of the runtime, which is both its most significant limitation and the thing that makes its achievement notable.
Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is a college graduate carrying significant student loan debt and a criminal record from an incident the film reveals carefully across its runtime, navigating a job market that is finding reasons to pass on her in ways the film presents as both legal and not entirely fair. When a friend tells her about a cash-for-credit-card-fraud gig, the barrier between the option and taking it is lower than it would otherwise have been, and the film follows the logic of each subsequent step with a precision that makes Emily's escalation feel like a sequence of individually defensible decisions rather than a single catastrophic choice. Theo Rossi plays Youcef, the person who runs the operation and becomes Emily's complicated professional partner.
Plaza is doing the most sustained dramatic work of her career, locating in Emily a specific combination of intelligence, exhaustion, and suppressed anger that makes her simultaneously easy to understand and difficult to entirely sympathize with. The film is honest about Emily's criminal record and its contribution to her situation in a way that adds complexity to what might otherwise be a straightforward portrait of systemic victimhood: she is not simply a person to whom things happen but a person whose history of decisions has shaped the options available to her, and the film holds both of those truths without resolving the tension between them into a simple verdict.
The limitations are structural and, given the format, perhaps unavoidable. The film's messaging is front-loaded in a way that produces some scenes where Emily feels more like a mouthpiece for the argument than a person living through it. The interview sequences, in which hiring practices that are real and legally defensible and also not entirely fair are dramatized, are the most pointed moments in the film and also the moments where the writing's intent is most visible through the dramatic surface. The student loan thread that frames Emily's initial motivation fades from the story in the second half, which follows the logic of the character's psychology accurately, the immediate urgency of the criminal enterprise displacing the abstract weight of the debt, but loses some thematic coherence in the process.
These are complaints about the ceiling rather than the floor. Emily the Criminal is a film that knows what it is trying to do and comes close enough to doing it that the gap is worth noting rather than damning. It is available to stream and is worth your time.
★ ★ ★ ★
AUTHORS
